// Beyond the Limited Potential //

// 7:00 pm // Friday, September 14, 2018 //
// Woodland Pattern Book Center //
// 720 E Locust St. Milwaukee, WI 53212 //

Applied Pressure (2018)
Kelly Sears

6 min 21 sec, Digital Video
Synopsis:
Sequential images sourced from dozens of massage books are activated to reflect on recent public conversation from this past year surrounding bodies, massage, and assault.

Ease the pain from past physical and mental distress. The body remembers. Aches may linger. Lay prone, breathe deeply, release tension, let go of the pain.

Artist Bio:
Kelly Sears is an experimental animator who recasts and reframes American archetypes and institutions to reimagine our own social and political legacy.  Each of her films contains recognizable cultural narratives that take fictional twists, becoming fantastic as history merges with myth. Her work has screened at film festivals such as Sundance, South by Southwest, American Film Institute, Los Angeles Film Festival, Ann Arbor, Black Maria and retrospective programs of her short work at Anthology Film Archives in NYC, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Portland Art Museum, and the SF Cinematheque. .  She teaches advanced filmmaking, animation, experimental documentary, and media archeology at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Initiation de group, le printemps (2018)
Laure Subreville

12 min 38 sec, HD Video
Synopsis:
Le printemps is the first season of the film Initiation de groupe.
They are men who train to be strong, powerful, but also to be brothers. They form a team. They are not in competition but participate in a rite of collective passage quite diffuse, over several months, without beginning or end. I want to film how a group is formed and how men weave bonds together through the ritual.
I try to build an artificial and symbolic space, where I can represent situations that have meaning for the group. Rites are signs of identity and ritual activity makes it possible to produce and renew these individual and collective identities.

Artist Bio:
It’s easy to recognize the stony forests, the lakes and the deserts through my films. The walk is the first step of my process. Then comes the sample and the fragmentation of the landscape. I tell the details of a dream, original nature, through the myth and the metaphor in my writing. I recall a course where the frontier between what lives and what dies overlap. A world populated by wild beasts, a dense flora and men who have complex and rich relationships. I see my entire work as the attempt of an initiatory journey of a hunter-gatherer who learns to know its territory and to be wary of the monsters which populate it.
My writing is consistent and adds to the reflection on my plastic work. Writing allows me to create shapes, and shapes, in turn, allow me to write again. The work is pushing like a stone, always more forward.
The video that follows the writings is essential. Filming in the wild is important in my production. The exploration dimension in my research is too. I collaborate to the maximum with figures that have a strong relationship to the land, their territory and have a special listening to the forest. Maintaining rich connections with a small team is slow and continuous.

Open a manhole cover while walking (2015)
Ryoya Usuha

5 min 57 sec, Digital Video
Synopsis:
Flipping through nostalgic photos of childhood homes, parks and abandoned playgrounds; the careful reproductions of our memory's landscapes through 3d object data. In this seamless blend between what is real and what is converted, Ryoya Usuha plays with how the technicalities of sound, graphics and other acquired datas can all stumble at enhancing the sensory overload of our pasts. (from Undervolt & Co.)

Artist Bio:
Born in 1991. Currently enrolled in the Graduate School of Film and New Media in Tokyo University of the Arts. Selected screenings include Image Forum Festival (2014), Vancouver International Film Festival (2014), DOTMOV FESTIVAL (2013), Campus Genius Award (2013) and more.

Silica (2017)
Pia Borg

23 min 3 sec, 35mm to Digital Video
Synopsis:
Silica explores territorial constructs and the boundaries of the real and the mediated in an opal mining town in the South Australian desert. Charting the journey of a film location scout, notions of settlement and belonging are investigated through images of a town in the midst of abandonment. Combining 35mm photography with microscopic and CG imagery, Silica blurs the actual and imaginary to probe ideas of value which support not only the gem trade but wider questions of identity and mythology.

Artist Bio:
Pia Borg was recently named as one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film in Filmmaker magazine. This year her work was featured in the Maltese Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale. She is the recipient of numerous prizes including the Pardino dor’o for best international short (Locarno Film Festival 2014) for the experimental documentary ABANDONED GOODS (codirected with Ed Lawrenson). Her films have been in the official selection of the Cannes Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, SXSW and Experimenta among others.