Friday April 21, 8pm MST
Core Samplings
Curated by Elle Burchill & Andrea Monti
At Guild Cinema
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Works by Ina Archer, Katherine Bauer, Bradley Eros & Jeanne Liotta, Doménica Garcia, Lisa Gwilliam & Ray Sweeten (DataSpaceTime), Sarah Halpern, Rebecca Shapass, Erica Sheu, Ezra Wube
Microscope presents a 60-minute program of works by artists that have appeared at the gallery’s screenings and/or exhibitions since its founding in September of 2010. In the spirit of our inaugural show — an energy we have strived to maintain over the 12 1/2 year of our existence — the emphasis for “Core Sampling” is not on a unifying theme, or on a historical summary, but rather on works by artists with unique artistic visions and voices who we are excited by.
The program of short films and videos, ranging from three to twenty-three minutes, represents a group of artists with whom we have worked with since our first exhibitions and events, as well as others who we have shown more recently, including in our emerging artist screening series YES. We have also mixed new and recent works with others dating back to as early as the mid-1990s.
Technologies and approaches involved in the making of the works include 35mm and 16mm film, found footage, VHS and videotape, stop-motion animation, and computer-generated 3D animation through original coding, among others. All works will be shown in their original format.
Microscope’s co-founders and co-directors Elle Burchill and Andrea Monti will both be in attendance.
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Microscope Gallery was founded by artists/curators Elle Burchill and Andrea Monti in 2010 to expand the visibility and recognition of artists — from emerging to innovators of their art forms working primarily with moving images, sound, performance, digital and other time-based arts — through both exhibitions and a weekly Event Series. Microscope was conceived as a space addressing what was seen as an unnecessary divide between time-based works exhibited in the white box setting of the gallery and those more experimental, personal, or poetic show in the black box of the theater and performance venue. Since then, Microscope has presented nearly 100 exhibitions and 600 events at the gallery as well as off-site. The gallery has also collaborated with various institutions including Anthology Film Archives, Film-makers’ Cooperative, Mono No Aware, Parrish Art Museum, Union Docs, Center Pompidou, Paris, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others.
PROGRAM:
TRT: approximately 68 minutes
Black Powder, White Smoke
by Sarah Halpern
35mm film, color, sound, 2014, 3 minutes
“I hope your eyes are adequately moistened. Blinking is tolerated, but not encouraged.” – S.H.
“1/16th of 100%!?”
by Ina Archer
Single-channel video, b&w, sound, 1993-96, 23 minutes
In the montage work “1/16th of 100%!?” – the title of which references the definition of a “colored person” based on the percentage of black ancestry according to a 1910 amendment to the constitution of the State of Virginia – Ina Archer’s re-appropriates scenes from VHS copies of Hollywood movies including he Jazz Singer (1927), Showboat (1951) and Imitation of Life (1959) that specifically concern race relations, the ramifications and remnants of the historical forms of minstrel shows in the film industry, and other forms of cultural appropriation. The work also draws attention to the changing definition of race and the way power and the law are connected: who do laws and contracts apply to or benefit? The video opens with various definitions of appropriation: “to take from (an)other’s possession for one’s own use,” followed by that of miscegenation: “marriage or cohabitation between whites and a member of (an)other race,” which was illegal in some U.S. states until 1967.
Darkness
by Ezra Wube
single-channel digital video, color, sound, 2021, 2 minutes 6 seconds
In “Darkness,” Ezra Wube questions negative associations of the title, presenting the word instead as “the alpha and omega,” a productive force behind the formation and existence of the universe and a condition leading to the possibility of light and images, as experienced in time. A continuous, fast-paced montage of black and white images culled from Google searches of compound words beginning with “dark” form the backgrounds for vivid animations of the same words in an attempt to undermine viewers’ preconceptions. Wube stresses that while blackness is visible because of the presence of light, darkness, defined as the absence of light, cannot be seen or therefore described.
Ceviche
by Doménica García
Digital Video, color, sound, 2018, 9 minutes 38 seconds
“Six women from different generations reveal the hidden emotions behind the preparation of Ceviche.” — DG. An experimental film which aims to reveal the hidden emotions behind meal preparation. Six women from different generations are assigned specific cooking stations and tasks, collectively preparing a bowl of shrimp ceviche. They glorify process over product, exposing the underworld that hides inside a ceviche cart.
Inside Outside Outside
by Rebecca Shapass
Single-channel video, color, sound, 2018, 2 minutes 58 second
“Inside Outside Outside” is a text-based video work that uses analog video mixing to explore themes of memory and gender. Original text acts as window and obfuscation through which heavily abstracted Hi-8 home video and recent images of the artist’s body are seen.
Eros
By Lisa Gwilliam & Ray Sweeten (aka DataSpaceTime)
Sound by Gryphon Rue
Single-channel video, color, sound, 2022, 3 minutes
“Eros” is the result of a collaboration between Lisa Gwilliam and Ray Sweeten (DataSpaceTime) and Gryphon Rue, who approached the duo to create a new work in response to music from the album A Spirit Appears to a Pair of Lovers. Formed of electric organ voices quivering in subtly dissonant overlapping patterns, Eros carries a sense of longing or even loss, as the individual parts fail to maintain harmonic synchrony, the beginning or ending of each phrase falling ceaselessly from mutual consonance. These qualities manifest visually as perspectives are continually shifting between micro or macro worlds. Negative space obscures the viewer’s field of vision, yet the shadowy presence of implied shapes suggests a tactile awareness.
Transcript
by Erica Sheu
35mm film, color, silent, 2019, 3 minutes
A fragile film on intimacy. The filmmaker transcribes feelings on film and Sunprint paper with Baby’s-breath flowers, its shadow, and old love letters of her father.
00 (Double Zero)
by Katherine Bauer
16mm film, color, silent, 2020, 11 minutes 42 seconds
Film shot on a day at the beach with The San Onofre power plant (or “The Tits” as locals call them). It was decommissioned in 2013 from failed generators which will continue to sit with nowhere to go in the sun and sand, rippling the tide along with the surfers. The film was crystallized in USA’s favorite and biggest deep pit mine mineral, Borax, the one stop shot preservative, cleanser and much more, including an ingredient used in photographic chemistry formulas! The original black and white crystalized film was frame by frame rephotographed, generating its own nuclear reacting color; glaring straight back at us from an atomic sun.
Dervish Machine
by Bradley Eros & Jeanne Liotta
16mm film, color, sound, 1992, 10 minutes
Hand-developed meditations on being and movement, as inspired by Gysin’s Dreammachine, Sufi mysticism, and early cinema. A knowledge of the fragility of existence mirrors the tenuousness of the material. The film itself becomes the site to experience impermanence, and to revel in the unfixed image.
