Monday August 19, 7:30pm
Land Secrets & Sympoiesis
Screening of works presented by The Skowhegan Alumni Alliance
As part of Conference Call: Moving Image
Free admission – RSVP recommended
Microscope is very pleased to co-present with the Skowhegan Alumni Alliance a screening of new and recent short video works by seven artists who have been recipients of the Skowhegan Artist Residency. The video program is curated by Danny Greenberg (A’18) and is part of the series “Conference Call: Moving Image,” which is taking place at various venues this summer and fall in New York City.
The screening at the gallery features works by Agil Abdullayev (A’23), Donna Conlon (A’02), Erin Johnson (A’19), Ayesha Khan (A’15), Emily Velez Nelms (A’18), Misra Walker (A’23), and Elizabeth M. Webb (A’18).
From the curator:
“Land Secrets & Sympoiesis anchors narratives hidden in the land from water, to ground, to air. Moving from each sphere of the earth we hear stories previously obscured by the process of time, overgrowth, gentrification, migration, and lack of archived record. From mapping the ocean floor, to cruising in Azerbaijan, to skeleton frames of luxury condos in the Bronx, every landscape tells a story. The program is one of five screenings as part of Conference Call: Moving Image made possible by the Skowhegan Alumni Alliance.” — Danny Greenberg
PROGRAM:
Run Time: approximately 40 minutesAct 1 Water
Erin Johnson (Alumni, 2019) – To Be Sound is To be Solid, 15 minutes
An oceanographer’s attempt to map the entire seafloor by 2030 parallels a filmmaker’s attempt to decipher the opaque queer history of a modernist seaside home through its complicated and circuitous floor plan.
Elizabeth M. Webb (Alumni, 2018) – Proximity Study (Sight Lines), 5 minutes 44 seconds
Proximity Study (Sight Lines) is an attempt to measure closeness despite temporal distance. My grandfather (whom I never met) worked as a longshoreman on the Brooklyn waterfront for 37 years. From Governors Island, I am able to look directly at his place of work; many years ago, he would have returned my gaze from the other side. I filmed the docks with 16mm and rowed in the channel between these two locations. The film print trailed behind the boat, tracing our route, recording our sight lines, and reaching to bridge the distance across the channel. Yet, the longer we rowed, the more the water erased the image.
Intermission (Wetlands)
Emily Velez Nelms (Alumni, 2018) – Shed Skin, 3 minutes 10 seconds
Diary entry is overlaid onto archival footage of the Florida Wetlands, shot by Homer A Brinkley in the early 20th c. Themes include land development, class ascension, domestic labor, and misremembering.
Act 2 Land (Capitalocene)
Misra Walker (Alumni, 2023) – In The Belly of The Beast, 4 minutes 49 seconds
Many horrors are hidden in the Bronx, from the Columbus monument to the skeleton frames of luxury condos, and the gruesome NYPD. 1492 is the original franchise that spawned spinoffs, sequels, and trilogies to be relevant to current generations. This video includes an exploration of a custom foley horror soundscape.
Agil Abdullayev (Alumni, 2023) – Voices from Sexualized Places, 4 minutes 34 seconds
Inspired by the artist’s ongoing research, “Voices from Sexualized Places” weaves together four unique perspectives, each offering a distinct and personal portrayal of the clandestine world of cruising. The film delves into the intricate tapestry of queer cruising culture across Azerbaijan, Turkey, Georgia, and Kazakhstan.
Ayesha Khan (Alumni, 2015) – Lag, 3 minutes 25 seconds
Lag is a stop motion animation played on loop. The work deals with the discrepancy in translation and the impossibility of portability of placehood. The characters are all objects in transit. Stop-motion exaggerates this glitchy toy movement similar to the act of translating. It explores the subtitle as site—where language is accommodated but not quite.
Encore (Air)
Donna Conlon (Alumni, 2002) – From the Ashes, 2 minutes 56 seconds
As we collectively confront a mortal environmental crisis, this video questions our relationships with the natural world and presents an image of the essence of nature: strong, tenacious, and perseverant, in spite of humankind.
Artist Bios
Agil Abdullayev graduated from Nottingham Trent University with a BA in Fine Art degree, In 2022, Abdullayev received the Seed Award from the Prince Claus Foundation (NL) and was a recipient of the Artlink Prize from SudKultur Fond (Swiss). Past exhibitions include MoMA (Georgia), Istanbul Contemporary (TR), Asian Art Museum (USA), Peabody Essex Museum (USA), Tate (London), Liverpool Biennial, South London Gallery, and Blindspot Gallery (Hong Kong). They have participated in artist-in-residency programs such as Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (Madison, ME, USA), Meet Factory (Prague, Cz), Büchsenhausen (Innsbruck, Austria), Goethe Institute (Tbilisi, Georgia) and Artlinks CEC (Almaty, KZ). In 2020, Agil founded a critical discussion and writing platform, “Çağdaşçılar” (eng: contemporaries) as a response to institutional censorship, lack of contemporary art media and art criticism and to support emerging and marginalized artists and cultural workers. They also founded ARTAZ (www.artaz.info) a database of artists from Azerbaijan to bring together more than 125 artists regardless of gender, sex, race, and cultural-social-political views.
Donna Conlon (b. 1966, Atlanta, GA) lives and works in Panama City, Panama. Her work has been shown at Diablo Rosso, Panama (2024, 2020), Espacio Mínimo, Madrid (2023, 2020), Night Lights Denver (2023), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2022), Tate St. Ives (2021), Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2020), Met Breuer, NY (2019), Kadist, San Francisco (2018), Prospect New Orleans (2017), the Asunción Biennale, Paraguay (2015), Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2014), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY (2014), El Museo del Barrio, NY (2011), Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach (2011), Mercosul Biennale, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2011), Istanbul Modern Art Museum (2006), and the Venice Biennale (International Exhibition and Italo-Latinamerican pavilion, 2005). Conlon was awarded an Anonymous Was a Woman grant (2022) and a Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation grant for emerging artists (2007). Her individual and collaborative works are in collections including the Kadist Foundation, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Tate Modern. Conlon earned an M.A. in Biology from the University of Kansas and an MFA in Sculpture from Maryland Institute College of Art.
Erin Johnson is a video artist and filmmaker based in New York. Her immersive installations and short films explore notions of collectivity, dissent, and queer identity. In her shape-shifting videos, constellations of artists, biologists, and film extras address the imbrication of science and nationalism. Johnson is a current Working Artist Fellow at Pioneer Works (Brooklyn, NY). She has recently completed residencies at Wave Hill (Bronx, NY), Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht, NL), Lower Manhattan Community Council (LMCC), Hidrante (San Juan, PR), and Lighthouse Works. She received an MFA and Certificate in New Media from UC Berkeley in 2013 and attended Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2019. Her work has been exhibited or screened at e-flux (Brooklyn), Rencontres Internationales de Paris/Berlin, BIENALSUR 2023 (Buenos Aires), MOCA Toronto (Toronto), Munchmuseet (Oslo), Sanatorium (Istanbul), Times Square Arts (New York), deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (Boston), Billytown (The Hague), and REDCAT (LA).
Ayesha Kamal Khan works with local material extractions and the incapacity of translation. She exaggerates temporary solutions to claim land, looking for a balance revealing the lack thereof. Khan’s work has been exhibited internationally, including the Karachi Biennale, the Queens Museum, and Petrine Gallery, Paris. She was a fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2023 and currently teaches at Pratt Institute among other colleges. She lives and works between Islamabad and New York City.
Emily Velez Nelms is interested in an array of methods and mediums, including installation, film, sound, and architectural processes. Her work is invested in phenomenology, interiority and intuition, and the ways that social structures affect spatial reality. She avoids disciplinary bounds. As a Masters of Environmental Design Candidate at the Yale School of Architecture, she is concerned with the impact of cultural tourism on the development of her home, southern Florida. Velez Nelms is a current Whitney ISP Studio Fellow and the current graduate coordinator for the Yale Group for the Study of Native America. She holds an MFA from UCLA.
Misra Walker (1992) Bronx, NY, is a community organizer, educator, and interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, and video. In 1971 Marvin Gaye implored the world: “What’s going on? OoOoO, What’s going on?” Walker carries this question with her, asking after Gaye, what IS going on? How can we understand our present material conditions if we don’t have the tools to analyze our past? Her work seeks to bring the inseparability of the present from the past to glimpse a possible future of liberation from capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. Walker received her BFA from Cooper Union in 2015 and her MFA from Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts in 2022.
My work is for and made possible by:
The workers that cut fresh sugarcanes and bag fronto leaves
To the comrades who jump over turnstiles
To the folks that have multiple tongues
To the lands that inspire revolutions
Elizabeth M. Webb is an artist and filmmaker whose work is invested in issues surrounding race and identity, often using the lens of her own family history of migration and racial passing to explore larger, systemic constructs and the renegotiation of their borders. She has screened and exhibited in the U.S., United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Ecuador, Singapore, Switzerland, Mexico, Spain, Austria, Norway and Germany, at venues including Vienna International Film Festival (Viennale), BlackStar Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the African American Museum in Philadelphia, Birmingham Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Art Houston, and Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans. She was a recipient of the inaugural Allan Sekula Social Documentary award in 2014, a Ford Foundation JustFilms Development Grant in 2023, and a Graham Foundation Grant in 2024. Her film Proximity Study (Sight Lines) received the jury award for Best Experimental Short at the 2022 New Orleans Film Festival and the Marian McMahon Award at the 2023 Images Festival. Elizabeth holds a dual MFA in Film/Video and Photography/Media from California Institute of the Arts and is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program in Studio Art, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. She is co-editor with Roberta Uno and Daniela Alvarez of the anthology FUTURE/PRESENT: Arts in a Changing America (Duke University Press, 2024).
About Conference Call: Moving Image
About the Skowhegan Alumni Alliance:
The Skowhegan Alumni Alliance is a community of volunteer artists organized to extend the Skowhegan campus experience to a broader community. Alliance projects are curated via group consensus and have included exhibitions, performances, publications, workshops, lectures, walkthroughs, and happenings.
About Conference Call:
Conference Call: Moving Image marks the second iteration of Skowhegan’s alumni exhibition program, inviting members of the Skowhegan Alumni Alliance to curate exhibitions featuring alumni artwork selected through an open call process. This project aims to forge meaningful bonds between artists and curators while showcasing the richness of the Skowhegan community to a broader audience.
Curation:
Each curator has developed a program of video works based on a theme of their choosing: Lost in Translation curated by Christian Amaya Garcia explores narratives around translation and displacement; Latinx Moving Image by Jesus Benavente showcases Latinx video work; Land Secrets & Sympoeisis curated by Danny Greenberg highlights narratives hidden in the landscape; and Eleanor Kipping has identified a series of desktop performances and video essays.
Screenings:
Throughout the summer and fall of 2024, Conference Call: Moving Image screenings will take place at a range of venues across New York City. These screenings will also feature supplemental programming, to be decided by each curator. By hosting screenings at various institutions, Skowhegan aims to strengthen its relationships with a broader community and provide artists with generative new contexts for their work.