// aDifferent festival // Program 2 //
// Return to Sender //
5:00 PM
Saturday, February 3rd, 2018
Woodland Pattern Book Center
720 E Locust St. Milwaukee, WI
Overwrite (2017), Ally Christmas
19 minutes 43 seconds, video
Synopsis:
An experimental video essay in which I explore the asymptotic gap between my physical and digital selves.
Artist Bio:
Ally Christmas is from Northern Virginia, but she currently lives and works out of Athens, GA. She works primarily with image- and time-based media to explore the boundaries and connections between the photographic medium and the self, death, spirit, and memory. Christmas is currently in her 3rd year at the University of Georgia pursuing her MFA in photography.
Optimistic Voices (2017), Rachel Lane
4 minutes 30 seconds, video
Synopsis:
A playground study.
Artist Bio:
Rachel Lane is an artist and educator based in Milwaukee, WI. She received her BA in Studio Art from the University of Virginia and her MFA in Film, Video, Animation and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Another Self Portrait (2017), Patrick Tarrant
7 minutes 27 seconds, video
Synopsis:
A single-take video recorded through the holes in a revolving film reel, this self-portrait renders two images of the artist as he manually draws an educational film through the projector. The 19th century American portraitist Mary Cassatt once complained that James Whistler “sacrifices the head for the ensemble” because, she argued, he treated the human figure more like a compositional element than a human being. In this self-portrait I am an ensemble, paired with another self, each of us sacrificed to a complicated and prismatic composition. Situating myself in this particular scene I am not only located in an overlapping space where the materiality of film and digital video interact, in fact my body’s own materiality mediates those other two.
Artist Bio:
Patrick Tarrant (Melbourne, 1969) is an Associate Professor in filmmaking at London South Bank University who has written on the feature-length portrait films of Pedro Costa (Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?), Ben Rivers (Two Years At Sea) and Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez (Manakamana). Patrick has made video portraits and observational city films, while developing a hybrid filmmaking method that brings HD video and a 16mm film projector together (in The Take-Up, The Trembling Giant & Another Self Portrait ). Patrick has had films screened at the Hong Kong, London and Melbourne International Film Festivals, and was nominated for Best Short Film at the 2016 London Film Festival.
Track 01 (2017), Ricardo Sarmiento
1 minute, video
Synopsis:
“R records his national anthem and throws it to the ocean as a message in a bottle”
Track 01 is a video-performance made after the end of the Wet feet, dry feet policy for Cubans in 2017. Then, I felt a chapter in the history of Cuban emigration was getting to its end, even when the paths were changing. Track 01 is a call for freedom. A poem for those who lie underwater and once sang with me.
Artist Bio:
Playwright, Performer, Stage director and Filmmaker.
Member of the aggrupation The Fifth Wheel (La Quinta Rueda).
His most recent plays are:
A strength pushing me down (performance for public spaces, 2017). Defined as “an experience to memorize in your body the dimensions of your will”.
And Ten ways to call a dead dog (2017), documentary play on Cuban emigration – work in progress.
Also his plays Emily (2015) about life and poetry of Emily Dickinson and The night of murderers (2016) has been staged at The Fifth Wheel.
+ information at www.teatrolaquintarueda.blogspot.com
His artwork Track 01 has been screened in many contemporary art events and cinema festivals as MICC (Muestra Iberoamericana de Cortometrajes - Frankfurt, Germany), Miami New Media Festival (USA), Festival de Cine Independiente de Elche (Spain), FICMA (Festival Internacional de Cine sobre el Medio Ambiente - Barcelona, Spain), “Voices from the Water” Bangalore Short Film Festival (India), “MIRA” Latin American Independent Cinema Festival (Bonn, Germany), VII Festival de Videoarte de Buenos Aires, and the exhibition America Late: 25 years in perspective (Casa de América, Madrid, Spain).
Hold a scholarship from the Goethe-Institut to attend to Panorama Sur, Intensive Seminar for Playwrights at Buenos Aires (July-August 2017). Gave a Lecture on the subject UTOPIA at Cervantes National Theater.
Artist-in-residency at inServi, Living Arts Residency by LEES - Laboratorio Escénico de Experimentación Social (October 2017, La Habana).
Artist-in-residency at Documenta Sur, a space of work with Stefan Kaegi, artistic director at Rimini Protokoll. (Since December 2016, La Habana).
Member of the workshop “Performance – Artistic strategies and political imagination” by Eleonora Fabiao. (February 2017, La Habana).
Member of the workshop by the Royal Court Theatre of London in La Habana (2014-2016) under the mentoring of Stephen Jeffreys.
Some of his work on criticism can be read at tablas, the most important magazine on Cuban theatre, and at the magazine of the International Theater Festival of La Habana.
Alpine Loop National Scenic Back Country Byway (2017), Fair Brane
6 minutes 24 seconds, video
Synopsis:
Alpine Loop National Scenic Back Country Byway is a short, experimental film that traces the observations of a retired intelligence officer as they return home for a high school graduation of a dear family member.
Artist Bio:
fair brane is a filmmaker/painter living and working in Los Angeles, CA.
I use film as a social practice, bringing form to my interests in the intersection of power, race, and social relations. My practice is also an investment into queer theory as a means of investigating & aligning with new developments in contemporary philosophy; specifically the post-Kantian realm of Speculative Realism and its nuanced interpretation: Object Oriented Ontology. Object Oriented Ontology (or OOO) “is a school of thought that rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects.” My films emphasize such a presence through the emphasis on text, backgrounds and objects.
Through my work I aim to draw attention to hidden oppressive constructs rigorously at work in our society. In the near future I see myself merging this ambition to draw attention to oppressive constructs with other modes of creativity. I would like to expand on the ways I see and use film. But foremost however, I hope to continue the tradition of avant-garde & experimental social practice cinema.
Can I Read Life As A Book? (2017), Müge Yildiz
4 minutes 10 seconds, video
Synopsis:
Everyday life is composed of images. Museums, cafés, metros, hospitals, streets and toilets which are parts of this ordinary life, by having the images and the text within them allows me to fictionalize this life again. In this way, video with these moving images turns into a book, a book of life.
Artist Bio:
Müge Yıldız lives and works in Istanbul, studied Cinema (BA), Faculty of Communication at Galatasaray University, Cinema (BA-Erasmus) in Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle, and studies Philosophy (MA) Institute for Social Sciences of Galatasaray University. She works with moving images and photography. She uses film (super 8mm, super 35mm), video and archive footage to create experimental films and expanded cinema
Last Words [sic] (2017), Hugo Ljungbäck
5 minutes 53 seconds, video
Synopsis:
In Last Words [sic], the artist revisits an email he received from a past lover.
Artist Bio:
Hugo Ljungbäck is a Swedish queer moving image artist, curator, and scholar, whose film and video works have screened internationally. He is a student in the Department of Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres, and an Undergraduate Research Fellow in the Department of English/Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Abound Box (2015), Sheri Wills
4 minutes 28 seconds, Super8 to video
Synopsis:
Shot on Super8 and combined with photograms, this abstract piece explores the film frame as a box for things that live within the margins of experience. Small moments, soon to be placed in a crowded shelf, impossible to find again. The sound is adapted from recordings from the University of California, Santa Barbara Cylinder Audio Archive.
Artist Bio:
Sheri Wills is an artist whose work is based in film, video performance, and installation. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including one-person shows at the Director’s Lounge in Berlin, the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema in NYC, and The International Experimental Cinema Exposition. Her films have been screened at venues including the London Film Festival, the International Film Festival in Rotterdam, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and is included in the Rizzoli book, Sonic Graphics: Seeing Sound, by Matt Woolman.
Sheri Wills received an MFA in filmmaking and an MA in modern art history, theory & criticism, both from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She did her undergraduate work in Visual Arts at the University of California in San Diego.
Her collaborations include live video projects with music composed by Jan Jirásek, Charles Norman Mason, Bright Sheng, and Ofer Ben-Amots and video performances with music ensembles, including the NYC choral group, Khorikos, the Providence String Quartet, Luna Nova New Music Ensemble, and Ensemble QAT in Montreal, at venues including Roulette in Brooklyn, the Firehouse Space in Bushwick, and the Czech Center in NYC.
She is a Professor in the department of Film/Animation/Video at the Rhode Island School of Design. She lives in New York City.