Monday October 19 – Thursday October 22, 10:30pm PT
YES: Karissa Hahn / Alee Peoples
Q&A via live chat with the artists at 8:45pm ET
Microscope is very pleased to present an online screening of works by Los Angeles-based artists Karissa Hahn and Alee Peoples as as the first 2020-21 edition of its emerging artist series YES.
The program includes a selection of works made by both artists shot on Super 8mm, 16mm film, or video. These two compelling groups of works, which often involve performance, frequently draw from and are informed by other artistic fields, such as collage, sculpture, and installation.
Hahn’s works — frequently at play with visual feedback — show a predilection for structuralist reflections, with the process of shooting often coming to the forefront. Lives within lives, movies within movies are entwined in works such as “Please step out of the frame” (2018) and “Apertures (a brighter darkness)” (2019). In the former, the central issue is the frame, with dizzying transitions between various laptop screen, application windows and the actual frame of the work: as we increasingly fall within the view of the cameras of our personal devices, are our lives becoming images? The latter work features an actual house window that serves as an camera aperture, letting the sunlight through the glass as a woman draws and closes the curtains. Eventually we see these very images projected onto those same curtains, this time serving as screen. At the end, the sun appears to be replaced by the bulb of a film projector, unless the projector had been there all along.
Things are often not what they seem in Peoples’ films, as well. Her imaginative works — able to find wonder in the everyday — in most cases present sequences of puzzling or mysterious shots that may reveal themselves only later in the viewing experience. The tight, intimate correlation between sound and image — a ball hitting a wall may cause a needle to skip on a record — as well as the frequent use of text in physical form — on a piece of paper dropped in water, sprayed on a window, written on and iPad or someone’s eyelids — are also distinctive traits of Peoples’ filmmaking. In “Decoy” (2017), photographs of walls and bridges are transformed into each other through paper-cut expedients, and the expected meanings of other imagery are quickly disproved. “If You Can’t See Your Mirrors, I Can’t See You” (2016) reminds us that all we see in the frame is but a small window into a larger scene, and that film in order to work has to be able to connect and be seen by both author and viewer.
Hahn and Peoples will be available for a Q&A with the online audience via live chat at 8:45pm ET.
TO WATCH:
A “WATCH NOW” link will become available on this page on Monday October 19 at 7pm. Passes for viewing can be purchased then, giving full access to the video program and live chat.
General admission $8 (Valid through Thursday October 22, 10:30pm ET)Member admission $6 (Valid through Thursday October 22, 10:30pm ET)
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Karissa Hahn is a visual artist based in Los Angeles who holds a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Her work articulates the nature of contemporary image reproduction and dissemination through the use of analogue and digital technologies. Whether creating performative films to highlight the hidden intensities of the everyday or blurring digital ephemera into physical reality through inkjet printing, she conjures up a storm of ’spectra ephemera.’ Hahn has shown around the planet Earth in various cinemas, galleries, and institutions such as the New York Film Festival Projections, TIFF Wavelengths, MoMA, CROSSROADS, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the Anthology Film Archives, among others.
Alee Peoples maintains a varied artistic practice that involves screen-printing, sewing, sculpture and film. Currently living in Los Angeles, she has taught youth classes at Echo Park Film Center and exhibited her sculpture and film work at GAIT and 4th Wall. Peoples has shown her films at numerous U.S. and international festivals and at museums and artist-run spaces. She is inspired by pedestrian histories, pop song lyrics and invested in the hand-made.
Program:
Standing Forward Full
By Alee Peoples, 16mm film, 2020, 5 minutes 38 seconds
A helter skelter is an amusement ride with a spiral slide built around a tower. Like this film, an exorcism attempt of an unrequited desire, itʼs either moving too fast or at a complete standstill. Disorienting but exciting.
If You Can’t See Your Mirrors, I Can’t See You
By Alee Peoples, 16mm film, color, sound, 2016, 12 minutes
A study of the frame. An equal exchange between friends.
Decoy
By Alee Peoples,16mm film, 2017, 10 minutes 37 seconds
Decoy sees bridges and walls as binary opposites and relates them to imposters in this world. Humans strive for accuracy. You don’t always get what you wish for.
Them Oracles
By Alee Peoples,16mm film, 2012, 7 minutes 26 seconds
Them Oracles is a skeptic investigation of what an oracle can be and what it would sound like. Human desire and blind faith allow, and maybe even will, these mystic soothsayers to exist.
Please step out of the frame.
By Karissa Hahn, Super 8mm, black & white, sound, 2018, 4 minutes
“Describing art as “Lynchian” is so common as to make the term useless, but Please Step Out of the Frame is a precise expression of that familiar and disquieting dread particular to David Lynch. Hahn’s film is one of the best shorts I’ve seen in recent years.” — Darren Hughes, senses of cinema
(I)FRAME
By Karissa Hahn and Andrew Kim, 35mm film, color, sound, 2016, 11 minutes
*flicker warning*
Shot at the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge in Pomona, CA on 16mm, datamoshed, and blown up to 35mm. (I) FRAME is a mechanical ballet set to the original tempo that characterizes motion on screen at 24 (I) frames a second….A video is a stream of information, and this moving image relies upon the relationship of static frames which are algorithmically determined…. In the language of video compression, the (I) frames are the reference points between which movement is interpolated. Manual deletion or misplacement of (I) frames results in a video glitch known as a datamosh … the stream of nformation d srupted, d sorgan zed … nterupeted … lost … the ( ) frame removed, rejected … BUT, reclaimed, the (I) frame, the burning bolts of the machine, are at once reasserted in this dance macabre….
Apertures (a brighter darkness)
By Karissa Hahn, Super 8mm film to digital, black & white, silent, 2019, 3 minutes
“Apertures (a brighter darkness), by contrast, works in a quasi-structuralist mode familiar from Hahn’s earlier Please step out of the frame. (2018), working through its programmatic methods via a carefully conceived spatiotemporal framework. Cutting rapidly across a series of images of a backlit window, Hahn systematically collapses the space between the camera and its object of inquiry, creating an array of organic superimpositions as the frame-within-a-frame configuration restlessly advances and recedes along a fixed axis. Occasionally, Hahn herself will enter the shot to adjust the curtains—in one instance even raising her arm to the glass in a subtle echo of Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)—before disappearing into the literal and figurative fabric of the composition as she cuts around her silhouetted figure. Not unlike Ernie Gehr’s Serene Velocity (1970), the film executes a visual sleight of hand that’s all the more uncanny for its relative simplicity. In just three minutes, it offers more thrills than any other Crossroads title.” — Jordan Cronk, Mubi Notebook
NewsReals (excerpt)
By Karissa Hahn, 16mm film, color, sound, WIP, 1 minute 30 seconds
*flicker warning*
An ongoing project that investigates the imagery generated by today’s 24-hour news cycle. Comprised of twitter birds, missile launches, and screengrabs of political speeches, this piece assesses the politics of media saturation at a granular level.
CATSIT commands
By Karissa Hahn, Super 8mm film to digital, color, sound, 2020, 5 minutes
A recital: Things said to me while working for a cat-sitting company in Beverly Hills.
Bouyensance Pt.1
By Karissa Hahn, Super 8mm film to digital, black & white, sound, 2020, 3 minutes 20 seconds
Part 1.
everything is becoming image
all is trapped and glitching
you are late for zoom again
your boss your teacher your lover is waiting
open window
By Karissa Hahn, Digital8 video, color, sound, 2016, 2 minutes
digital8>mac reverb
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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).