Monday August 31 – Thursday September 3, 10:30pm PT
Meredith Drum
Search for Delicious
Q&A with the artist via live chat at 8:45pm ET
Microscope is very pleased to welcome Meredith Drum back to our event series for a solo online screening of her work. The program includes nine short videos made from 2005 to today by the artist addressing issues such as the environment and global warming, feminism, anthropology, and the history of cinema, with particular attention towards endangered species and cultures.
Drum’s early videos display the freshness and experimental qualities of works representing an independent and very personal form of cinema. An idea, a script, a couple of actors, and a handheld video camera seem to have been about all that was needed for the making of her 2009 video “The Double” — from her “low-fi sci-fi” trilogy Ficciones — a minimalist blending of The Magic Flute with Tarkovsky’s Stalker.
“Search for Delicious” (2005) and “Body Without Organs” (2004) defy simple categorization, as well. In the former, after a preamble devoted to a found film about a night lamp named Bimbo, the viewers are confronted with a prescient discussion about the disappearance of flora and fauna and space travel, followed by stunning time-lapse sequences of plants growing in a glass bowl and a crane assembling the metal frame of a construction. The latter, a nod to Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen, is an ironic re-contextualization of the philosophical concept of “corps sans organes” — used by Deleuze and Guattari and discussed in one of their essays, fragments of which are read aloud in voice-over — within the cooking of a recipe of French haute cuisine, a stuffed chicken carefully prepared by a woman in apron floating against a green-screened video background.
Drum’s latest and perhaps most oneiric works, composed through 3D animation, were prompted by her “frustration with the misogynistic, militaristic, racist, and consumer-driven visual culture that dominates many commercially produced virtual worlds.” In “If You’ve Got the Money, Honey,” the “wolf of Wall Street” Jordan Belfort is seen on multiple screens of a drive-in theater as a luxury sport car squeals its tires at the rhythm of Wille Nelson’s song. The program ends with “Taking Residence: A History of A.I.R. Gallery,” a documentary project about the history of A.I.R. gallery, a groundbreaking art space — still active — founded in New York in 1972 exclusively run by and showing work by women artists.
A live Q&A with Drum and the online audience via chat follows the screening at 8:45pm ET.
TO WATCH:
Passes for viewing give full access to the video program and live chat.General admission $8 (Valid through Thursday September 3, 10:30pm ET)
Member admission $6 (Valid through Thursday September 3, 10:30pm ET)
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Meredith Drum is an interdisciplinary artist working with video, animation, installation, augmented reality, and various modes of public participation. Her projects center around the cultivation of care for others, particularly the vulnerable, both human and non-human lives Her work is influenced by climate justice, cinema history, intersectional feminism, multi-species anthropology, cultural studies, game studies, science fiction, and contemporary visual culture, among others. Drum’s work has been supported by grants and residencies from a range of institutions including the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, iLand (Interdisciplinary Lab for Art, Nature + Dance), the Wassaic Project, the Experimental Television Center, ChaNorth, ISSUE Project Room, the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts, HASTAC, and Wave Farm Transmission Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. Drum is an Assistant Professor in the School of Visual Art at Virginia Tech. With her husband, artist Mitch Miller, and their cats, Cleo and George, she lives in the mountains of Virginia.
Program:
Body Without Organs
By Meredith Drum, single-channel video, 2004, 6 minutes
Body Without Organs is full of quotes from the famous text by Deleuze and Guattari set to a recipe from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Actress/Chef: Galya Kovalyova.
Old Trash, Dead Horse
By Meredith Drum, single-channel video, 2009, 3 minutes 18 seconds
The artist inspects an old landfill that rests on a dumping grounds for dead horses from an adjacent 19th-century glue factory. The territory is now a feral area within Gateway National Park, desolate and infrequently visited. Tides have exposed an odd assortment of antique trash. The work, a collage of investigations under the noon sun and by flashlight at sunrise, was made in collaboration with choreographer Sarah White-Ayón with dancers: Colin Stilwell and Rebecca Brooks.
If You’ve Got the Money, Honey
By Meredith Drum, single-channel video, 2014, 2 minutes
If You’ve Got the Money, Honey is a rambunctious ride through the darkness of Wall Street.
The Double
By Meredith Drum, single-channel video, 2009, 9 minutes 36 seconds
The Double — from the trilogy Ficciones — is a low budget science fiction short that re-imagines Mozart’s The Magic Flute with a female hero threading her way through a zone (a nod to Tarkovsky). Performers: Juliana Francis, Nadia Mahdi and Kameron Steele. Camera by Sandy Amerio and score by Shannon Fields.
The Chthulu and the Final Girl
By Meredith Drum, single-channel video, 2017, 1 minute 49 seconds
The Chthulu and the Final Girl is is inspired by Donna Haraway’s recent writing on the Anthropocene, Capitalocene and Chthulucene. In particular, it is energized by Haraway’s focus on chthonic entities, figures of creation and destruction. The work also rises out of Drum’s interest in the final girl trope: the female survivors of horror films interpreted as potent, if murky, icons of power, resistance and speculative feminism. Score composed by Charlie Cloutier.
Search for Delicious
By Meredith Drum, single-channel video, 2005, 12 minutes 26 seconds
Search for Delicious was inspired by the two literary forms, the Bildungsroman and the picaresque novel. The role of hero in this video shifts from the little boy with his lamp to the woman with her tree finding key and her circle of female friends. The tragedy is never solved: the loss of innocence and love is overshadowed by the mass destruction of the vulnerable world, human and nonhuman, at the hands of corrupt capitalists. With Juliana Francis, Leigh Garrett Lyndon(voice), Mary N. Taylor, Marie Losier and Kristen Schiele.
Cold Trouble
By Meredith Drum, single-channel video, 2018, 2 minutes 9 seconds
Cold Trouble, also titled Kingdom 5KR and Disco Volante, is inspired by the plethora of ready-made 3D virtual objects of desire, including yachts, available for sale within online marketplaces. And in the sensual world, IRL, the piece is inspired by Kingdom 5KR, a super yacht owned by Al-Waleed bin Talal, member of the Saudi Royal Family. The boat is named for his investment company The Kingdom Holding Company, his lucky number and the initials of his children. Waleed purchased the boat from Trump, who called her the Trump Princess. The yacht was originally built in 1980 for Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi, and named for his daughter Nabilia. It was used in the 1983 Bond film Never Say Never Again and referred to as the Flying Saucer or Disco Volante. But cold trouble describes the artist’s feelings about representations of capitalism in CGI.
Water in the Desert 122 ° F
By Meredith Drum, single-channel video, 2019, 4 minutes 53 seconds
Water in the Desert 122 ° F is a meditation on the past and future of the miles of canals that thread through Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona. The largest pre-Columbian irrigation system in North America, the canals were first engineered 2000 years ago by the ancestral Sonoran Desert people. This Native history was destroyed by the construction of the settler-colonial metropolis. This urban space of asphalt and concrete is ill-prepared for the heat that is coming. The summer now reaches 122°F. At 130°, what happens to the city’s vulnerable people, plants, and animals? Adaptation or abandonment? Score by Andrea Williams.
Taking Residence: A History of AIR Gallery
By Meredith Drum, single-channel video, 2008, 16 minutes 27 seconds
Taking Residence: A History of AIR Gallery is a short documentary about the first non-profit, all-women’s gallery in the U.S., AIR Gallery, founded in 1972 in downtown New York City. This documentary was made on the occasion of a history show about AIR at Fales Library and the Tracey / Barry Gallery at New York University. This work was produced by Kat Griefen and AIR Gallery with major funding provided by Fales Library.
Running time: approx. 62 minutes
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Microscope Gallery Event Series 2020 is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).