Monday May 13 – Thursday May 16, 11pm PT
YES: Derek Jenkins / Sara Sowell
In person & online
Microscope is pleased to welcome to the gallery artists and filmmakers Derek Jenkins and Sara Sowell, who are respectively based in Hamilton, Ontario, and Milwaukee, WI, for a screening of both of their works as part of our emerging series YES. The screening will also take place online.
The eight short works in the program, including several NY premieres, were made between 2016 and 2023 and were primarily filmed on 16mm film, with others shot on Super 8mm and video. The works will be screened on site in their original formats.
In works often borne out of the interaction of 16mm film with the endless digital TV stream, and utilizing DYI experimental methods, Sowell offers sociological and ecological critiques such as on the culture of and standards proposed by America’s Next Top Model and the environmental impact of private jet personal transportation, or that created by the celluloid film her works are made with.
Jenkins’ personal and playful filmmaking — often resulting from unconventional film processes or ideas used to source sound — in these works formulates odes to obsolete newsprint machinery, a large Canadian herbarium, and everyday family moments, finding meaning and opportunity for social activism even in an unmown flower field.
Jenkins and Sowell will be in attendance and available for a Q&A following the screening.
General Admission: $9
Members & Students: $7
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Derek Jenkins (Canada/USA) is a motion picture photographer born in Monroe, Louisiana in 1980. His practice is handmade, personal, and documentary, with an interest in labour, ecology, and technology—specifically the reciprocal relationships between tools, materials, and ways of knowing. His films have been exhibited at festivals, museums, and galleries, including DocLisboa, Prismatic Ground, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, McMaster Museum of Art, ARKIPEL – Jakarta International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, Antimatter Film Festival, the8fest, FRACTO Experimental Film Encounter, Photophobia, Media City Film Festival, Experiments in Cinema, Mimesis Documentary Festival, and non-syntax Experimental Image Festival, among many others. Previously a technician at Niagara Custom Lab, he is Executive Director of Hamilton Artists Inc. and board chair at the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. He lives and works in Hamilton, Ontario.
Sara Sowell is an artist and filmmaker who works with pre-existing images and expanded cinematic form. Her work has shown in international film festivals, artist-run spaces and galleries including Underscore, Milwaukee, WI; CROSSROADS, San Francisco, CA; The Nightingale, Chicago, IL; The Wexner Center, Columbus, OH; Baltic Analog Lab, Cēsis, LV; and The Film-makers’ Cooperative, New York.
Program:
RHYTHM AS A GIRL
By Sara Sowell, single-channel video, color, sound, 2020, 11 minutes 33 seconds
RHYTHM AS A GIRL is an experimental essay film that challenges hierarchies within visual, bodily, and spiritual systems used by painters Hilma af Klint and Mark Rothko. af Klint’s notes chart the corners of the 20th century alongside the artist’s burgeoning understanding of perception, sensation, and power.
The Girl Who Is
By Sara Sowell, 16mm film, B&W, sound, 2021, 6 minutes
Conjuring Freud’s id while watching America’s Next Top Model.
Color Negative
By Sara Sowell, 16mm film, color, sound, 2023, 6 minutes
Guesstimating the ecological impact of artist film across the private airlines of the Kardashian-Jenners. Film turns facts into flicker. Hand-processed color negative film.
Reference Material
By Sara Sowell, 16mm film, B&W, 2023, 3 minutes
Re-photographing Man Ray’s photographs of nude women in relation to my own photographic failures and figures.
This is how I print
By Derek Jenkins, 16mm film, B&W, silent, 2019, 3 minutes
A brief documentary study of the letterpress which produced the multiples for my film work, “Contents.”
Herbaria x Pelicula: Field Portfolio
By Derek Jenkins, 16mm film, color and B&W, silent, 2021, 11 minutes
A consideration of collection as both archive and act, “Herbaria × Pelicula” examines the work that takes place at the HAM Herbarium of Royal Botanical Gardens (Canada), located in Burlington ON along the edges of Cootes Paradise wetland, traditional territory of the Mississauga and Haudenosaunee peoples. The herbarium collection, which houses over 60,000 holdings, comprises specimens from around the world but is made up primarily of local vascular plant types gathered by the scientific community and educated hobbyists. Combining documentary footage of the herbarium space, code-generated database animations of digitized specimen sheets, and images of plant life processed in plant material, the film work positions the specific labour of botanical gathering and collection as an image-making practice in addition to a mode of knowledge production. This “Field Portfolio” is a single channel version of the multichannel installation “Herbaria × Pelicula.”
The Shouting Flower
By Derek Jenkins, 16mm film, color, sound, 2018, 12 minutes
A work about collaboration and process, “The Shouting Flower” approaches political resistance from multiple subject positions — plant, child, filmmaker. Using images processed in plant material that was gathered at key locations throughout the city, as well as direct animation and audio recorded on a child’s toy, the film documents its own creation within a landscape of hostility and neglect. A collaboration against cooperation, it becomes as it refuses. Refusing, dispersing, it shouts, “No!”
When we reached the top of the stairs, Ruby asked me, “Is this a new world? Baba, is this a new world?”
By Derek Jenkins, Super 8mm on digital, color, silent, 2016, 2 minutes 30 seconds
An unexpected voyage of discovery, edited in camera, on a single cartridge of Super 8 film.
TRT: 56 minutes approx.
