// An Intangible Half //

Virtual Program presented in partnership with
Woodland Pattern Book Center
as a part of the NEA Big Read Event

Discussion will be held on
Sunday, May 31, 2020
2:00 pm (19:00 GMT)

Please pick up a copy of Stephanie Burt’s Advice from the Lights from Woodland Pattern if you have not done so already.

Escape Route (2017)
Milly Cope, 3 min 43 sec, video

Synopsis:
'Escape Route' is a experimental short film I created around four years ago when I had acquired a very bulky and slightly broken 90s Panasonic VHS camera.  Upon reflection it is about the idea of undressing and dressing, reforming - for no one but for oneself. Of vacant space.. boredom, loneliness. Impending doom, perhaps. It feels uncomfortable - the idea of comfort vs discomfort. The body and mind within a space sat alongside the parallel worlds of sound and visual.

Artist Bio:
Milly Cope is a photographer living and working in London. Her personal work aims to capture the honest truth of individuals with shamelessness and power. Through the lens of analog equipment she wishes to showcase a celebration of the beauty of the human existence and body in its most natural and un-retouched state.

Quasi-solipsistic (2019)
Marthe Peters, 10 min 53 sec, video

Synopsis:
Minnie is having a spectacular Friday night. She’s listening to some nice music. She saw a good film. She does a have to pee a lot, but she gets it, she’s quite a lot.

Minnie sits/Minnie stands/Minnie lies down/Minnie draws on her arm/Minnie eats,… Minnie is thinking. She consciously chooses to live inside her head, within the four walls of her room. The moment she is confronted with the outside world, she panics.

Artist Bio:
Marthe Peters is a Dutch third-year-student studying at KASK in Gent. She makes experimental films exploring the border between documentary and fiction. Most of her films evolve around topics such as femininity, solitude and existentialism.

The animal that therefore I am (2019)
Bea de Visser, 10 min 37 seconds, HD video (4k original)

Synopsis:
What does an animal see when she looks back at us? Three animals and a woman are in a closed situation in which they have to deal with each other. The story is told from the individual Point of View of each character, perhaps even more from the Point of Feel of all animals. We do not just look through the eyes of the characters; instead the viewer moves through multiple possible mental landscapes to experience different perceptions
when species meet. The camera emphasizes this idea of the animal gaze by filming them intently. As the voiceover narration suggests, the film is premised on the
idea that animals observe and judge us. Based on complex thoughts about our relationship with the animal kingdom, the film tackles this huge subject from an oblique angle.

Artist Bio:
Bea de Visser is recognized for her film art, installation work and sound performances. In her work, she questions elementary social issues in a cinematic language, poetic in nature and through an alternative narrative form. Bea de Visser attended the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Prior she pursues her studies painting with a study electroacoustic sound. She initially began her career as a sound and performance artist in
the trendy club scene and artist’s spaces early 1980-ies. With her installation work and films, she was asked for international exhibitions in museums, art spaces, galleries and the international film festival circuit worldwide. Bea de Visser leads to date the independent
studio Anotherfilm. She is a lecturer at the University of the Arts, Utrecht.

Greatness (2017)
Emma-Kate Guimond, 3 min 39 sec, video

Synopsis:
Greatness captures a simple action done 3 times: align my bare bum cheeks with two grapefruit halves and sit on them. What is not captured is how uncomfortable the acid of the fruit made my ‘parts’ thereafter.

I have returned to the grapefruit many times in my practice and am unsure why, though I assume it is something to do with their weight and bitterness. I read once that it's a psychological fruit.

Artist Bio:
Emma-Kate Guimond is formally trained in contemporary dance but her preferred medium is the slideshow. She gets paid to perform. Her performances are embodied, difficult, colorful, and cartoony. Using gesture, image, and text, she works with a spectrum of performative modes that ranges from unaware, to barely anything, to technical, to brutalist, to expressionistic, to dramatic⁠—in order to locate and relocate power and protagonism.

Living and working in Montreal, Canada, she has presented performances at Visualeyez Festival in Edmonton (2013), Mountain Standard Time in Calgary (2014, 2018), FADO Emerging artist series in Toronto (2014), as well as VIVA! in Montreal (2019). From 2009-2017 she was co-director of WIVES collective, with whom she presented feeled (OFFTA, 2016) and ACTION MOVIE (Théâtre Lachapelle, 2017). Recent performances and exhibitions include ATTABLER (2ième porte à gauche, Agora de la danse, 2018), You (TOPO, 2019) and Sequence of events (Arprim, 2019).

found footage (2017)
Marthe Peters, 2 min 7 sec, video

Synopsis:
‘found footage’ is an audiovisual experiment about objectification versus sensuality. Apart from this, the film can be seen as a visual exploration that subtly challenges the single screen concept of film, while searching for unity in different textures and colours, creating a flow without using narrative.

Artist Bio:
Marthe Peters is a Dutch third-year-student studying at KASK in Gent. She makes experimental films exploring the border between documentary and fiction. Most of her films evolve around topics such as femininity, solitude and existentialism.

Chairs Missing (2011)
Bea de Visser, 18 min 43 sec, HD video (RED 4K original)

Synopsis:
Brief encounters in a semi enclosed public space, the pool. These short meetings are more suggested than actually proposed, because the action ultimately always occurs off-screen. In a stream of repetitive patterns without an added music score, no text and the lack of a plot, we cannot escape from the underlying tension that is evoked when we are witnessing people who possibly meet one another in an empty, barren public space. Nowhere is uncovered to what is actually happening. The only genuine person is the man we follow and maybe his visions during the last days before the demolishment of the pool. Visions, history and reality that converge?

.... A man walks through the hallways past lockers and cubicles. A boy plays in one of the lockers. A girl walks into a dressing room, opens the door, but does not enter. A boy walks past the grandstand where a young woman stares into the water. A woman swims her baby to the edge of the pool. The building is filled with sounds: water, machinery, leaking outside noise like the sound of emptiness. And old man steps off the high dive ...

We come to know anything about the people we 'follow' or meet. Everyone seems calm and happened to come by. It derives the film its quality as stylized documentary observation or film essay. Yet there is turmoil and tangible threat.

Artist Bio:
Bea de Visser is recognized for her film art, installation work and sound performances. In her work, she questions elementary social issues in a cinematic language, poetic in nature and through an alternative narrative form. Bea de Visser attended the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Prior she pursues her studies painting with a study electroacoustic sound. She initially began her career as a sound and performance artist in
the trendy club scene and artist’s spaces early 1980-ies. With her installation work and films, she was asked for international exhibitions in museums, art spaces, galleries and the international film festival circuit worldwide. Bea de Visser leads to date the independent
studio Anotherfilm. She is a lecturer at the University of the Arts, Utrecht.