Monday June 8 – Thursday June 11, 10:30pm
YES: Talena Sanders / Katie Vida
Microscope is very pleased to present another edition of the ongoing emerging artist series YES with an online screening of works by Talena Sanders and Katie Vida.
The two medium-length video works by Sanders and Vida in the program are both devoted to deeply influential, pioneering, and boundary-pushing women artists who lived and died around the same time at the turn of the twentieth century. These two controversial figures, Mary MacLane and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, advocated for sexual freedom, gender equality, women’s empowerment, and generally the need to live their lives by their own terms, which they did in uncompromising fashions still inspiring today.
Talena Sanders’ 2018 film “Between my flesh and the world’s fingers” is centered around queer writer, film pioneer and provocateur Mary MacLane, also known as the “Wild Woman of Butte.” Built upon the diaries penned by MacLane between 1902 and 1917 — she achieved literary fame through her first “I Await the Devil’s Coming” written when she was only nineteen — as well as her work on the autobiographical silent movie “Men Who Have Made Love to Me” (1917), Sanders’ film represents “the act of a woman telling her own story through that of another woman.” Superimposed to stunning views of nature in the open are words from MacLane’s journals, often appearing and disappearing as though belonging to book pages turned by the wind on a field, or by the textures of Sanders’ hand processed film itself.
Katie Vida’s “Shelly” (2019) is a 45-minute video entirely made on Snapchat by the artist — whose facial features are augmented through the app’s filters — at once personal diary and song to a trailblazing artist who was written out of history, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Vida’s fictional character Shelly, just as von Freytag-Loringhoven moves from Sparta, Kentucky to New York, only with a lapse of 100 years. The updated version of the relocation finds Shelly settling in a pricey Airbnb apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Kicking off with the contagious excitement of an artist taking chances in the big apple, “Shelly” gradually turns somber, and pervaded with a sentiment of marginality and loneliness, both human and artistic. A work literally shot with a single hand — yet able to amuse, move, and inspire — poses a question as to the necessity of large movie productions.
The online program will go live on Monday June 1st at 7:30pm and will be available for the following 72 hours. It will be preceded by a short pre-recorded introduction by co-directors Elle Burchill and Andrea Monti. A live chat and Q&A with Sanders and Vida will follow the program on Monday at 9pm ET.
TO WATCH:
General admission $8 (Valid through June 11, 10:30pm ET)Member admission $6 (Valid through June 11, 10:30pm ET)
Program:
“Between my flesh and the world’s fingers”
By Talena Sanders, 16mm film, 2018, 31 minutes 5 seconds
“I never give my real self. I have a hundred sides, and I turn first one way and then the other. I am playing a deep game.”
Mary MacLane, the Wild Woman of Butte, Montana, published her diaries in 1902 and 1917. As an out queer and proto-feminist at the turn of the century, MacLane became notorious upon the publication of her 1902 diary, I Await the Devil’s Coming. She was whisked away from the industrial hellscape of her copper mining Montana hometown to a life in the public eye as an author, journalist, female film pioneer and always a provocateur – sending up social norms throughout her career, with a special focus on staid notions about women and sexuality.
Between my flesh and the world’s fingers is an experimental essay and diary film primarily based on her published diaries and her film work. Though the film is not directly a personal film, the production is founded in part in the act of a woman telling her own story through that of another woman, a trailblazing figure from the past.
“Shelly”
By Katie Vida, HD single-channel video, 2019, 44 minutes 58 seconds
“Shelly” (2019) is a video work developed entirely on Snapchat, the ubiquitous social media app known for its face altering (or filtered) features. The piece includes filtered selfie video “diaries” by Shelly, a Sparta, Kentucky native who has exhausted her savings on a three month Airbnb rental in Bushwick, Brooklyn to explore New York City. Shelly’s only link between her upbringing and the Arts is a little known poet and artist, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927), who briefly lived in Sparta upon arriving in in the United States in 1910. Some scholars have argued that Freytag-Loringhoven later went on to gift “Fountain” to Marcel Duchamp in 1917, potentially making her one of the most important marginalized art historical figures of the 20th century. The space between Shelly and Baroness Elsa is one of marginality, both somber and playful in its liminality. What Shelly finds, arriving in New York City 100 years after the Baroness inhabited it, is the difficult task of parsing her disparity and her wonderment, her curiosity and her limitations. Though Shelly could never afford to stay in New York, her meanderings in the city are meaningful for their short-lived revelations. Alongside her confessional videos, a simultaneous scopophilia arises as she begins to obsessively video document museum-goers at the moment they capture a photograph of an artwork on their phones. This dual address of the private and public sheds light on smartphone technology as a form of embodiment, elucidation, connection, and at times, detachment.
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Talena Sanders makes moving image works that explore the development of individual and collective senses of identity in affinity groups. Her films and videos are informed by an interest in presenting the many ways that social institutions can shape individuals’ lives on both the broader geopolitical level and the most intimate, personal scales. A common starting point for developing new projects begins with an interest in interrogating narratives from histories and how historical records can influence senses of identity, especially as it relates to ideas of national and regional character. She believes there are endless means to present and interrogate materials from the real on the spectrum from nonfiction to narrative production approaches. Her work often places historical found/archival footage and audio in dialogue with contemporary media captured on location to question constructs of privilege and power in who gets authorized to tell the story of a shared experience. She holds an MFA from Duke University’s Experimental and Documentary Arts program and a BFA from the University of Kentucky. Her work has been screened, exhibited, and collected internationally, including at the New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant-Garde, FID Marseille, Montreal International Documentary Festival, Fronteira Festival, Viennale, DokuFest Kosovo, BFI London Film Festival, and Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art.
Katie Vida (Brooklyn, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist. Vida is the recipient of fellowships at The MacDowell Colony, Shandaken Project, VCUQatar and Fanoon: Center for Print Media Research (Doha, Qatar), Yaddo, Millay Colony, and the Budapest Puppet Theater (Budapest, Hungary) among others. Vida has presented work at venues including: The Richard and Dolly Maass Gallery at SUNY Purchase (Purchase, NY), ALLGOLD MoMA PS1 (Queens, NY), Creative Time (New York, NY), Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT), The Luggage Store (San Francisco, CA), and was awarded Best Experimental Film for “Shelly” at the Brussels Independent Film Festival in 2020. She has served as Visiting Artist and Guest Lecturer at institutions including Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island), Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, New York), University of Hawaii-Manoa (Honolulu, HI), and VCUQatar (Doha, Qatar). Vida holds an MFA from Yale University School of Art and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design.
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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).