Call for Morning // Cradle to the Floating World
// January 24th 2018 // 7:00 PM //
// Woodland Pattern Book Center // 720 E Locust St // Milwaukee, WI //
After The Empire (2008) // Elodie Pong //
13 min 50 sec // HD Video //
Synopsis:
Zurich-based video artist Elodie Pong is known for her subtle, analytic works focusing on how human relationships and cultural conventions impact contemporary society. In 'After the Empire', Pong orchestrates face-to-face conversations between various late icons of popular culture and political history, including Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Batman, and Karl Marx. Surrounded by a post-apocalyptic set, the actors embody their character’s individual and symbolic extremes, longings, and ideals in simultaneously humorous and elegiac ways. (Source)
Artist Bio:
Elodie Pong (born in 1966 in Boston, USA) is a Swiss artist and filmmaker known for her subtle, analytic works, often built as cycles or in series, which focus on human relationships, cultural codes and their impact on contemporary society. As a university-trained sociologist and anthropologist, she often deals with social structures in her artistic work. The wide-ranging oeuvre of the video artist revolves around questions of identity and collective identity construction, intimacy and separation, self stylization and unstable communication situations in a pluralistic and individualized society. Until 2004, her projects, installations and video works mainly focused on immediate visualisation of sociological structures such as intimacy, friendship, issues of gender and communication. Her more recent films can be read as multi-layered analysis and deconstruction of these very themes, where the viewer becomes part of the constellation by being offered different readings according to which the works are brought together. Elodie Pong has received several awards and grants; her work is exhibited in group and solo exhibitions worldwide. She lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland. (Source)
Untitled (Broniouw Song) (2011) // Alicja Rogalska //
4 min 47 sec // HD Video //
Synopsis:
A contemporary folk-song on the socio-economic situation of the rural area of Masovia, Poland, known for rich folk music traditions and the highest unemployment in the country. The song, written in collaboration with villagers and the folk singing group Broniowianki, was presented locally in a series of performances and documented on video, contrasting ethnographic representation (the image) with the peopleʼs own view of their situation (the lyrics). The tune was appropriated from a local love song. Commissioned by Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw for Cut project.
Artist Bio:
Alicja Rogalska is a visual artist living in London and Warsaw and working internationally. Her practice is interdisciplinary, collaborative and focuses on social structures and the political subtext of the everyday. She mostly works in specific contexts creating situations and performances, which then become the material for videos and installations. These events are attempts to practise a different political reality here and now, create space for many voices to be heard and to co-exist, whilst collectively searching for emancipatory ideas for the future.
Alicja graduated with an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London (2011) and an MA in Cultural Studies from the University of Warsaw (2006). She is currently in residence at KulturKontakt in Vienna, was a 2017 IASPIS resident artist in Stockholm and is a recipient of 2016-17 Artsadmin bursary in London.
The Idea of North (1995) // Rebecca Baron //
14 min 30 sec // 16mm to video //
Synopsis:
In the guise of chronicling the final moments of three polar explorers marooned on an ice floe a century ago, Baron’s film investigates the limitations of images and other forms of record as a means of knowing the past and the paradoxical interplay of film time, historical time, real time and the fixed moment of the photograph. Marrying matter-of-fact voiceover and allusive sound fragments, evidence and illustration, in Baron’s words, “meaning is set adrift”.
— New York Film Festival, 1997, “Views from the Avant-Garde” program notes
Artist Bio:
Rebecca Baron is a Los Angeles-based media artist known for her lyrical essay films which explore the construction of history, with a particular interest in still photography and its relationship to the moving image.
Her work has screened widely at international film festivals and media venues including documenta 12, International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Anthology Film Archive, Toronto Film Festival, London Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, Flaherty Film Seminar, Viennale and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her films have received awards at the San Francisco, Black Maria, Montreal, Leipzig, Athens, Onion City, KIN, Sinking Creek and Ann Arbor Film Festivals. She is the recipient of a 2002 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2007 Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She has taught documentary and experimental film at Massachusetts College of Art, Harvard University, and since 2000 at California Institute of the Arts.
Masanao Abe - Cloudgraphy (2015) // Helmut Völter //
5 min // video //
Synopsis:
In 1927, the Japanese physicist Masanao Abe built an observatory with a view of Mount Fuji. From it, over the course of fifteen years, he recorded the clouds that sourrounded the mountain. He was interested in the scientific question of how the air currents around Fuji could be visualized by means of film and photography. (Source)
Artist Bio:
Helmut Völter, born 1978, is an artist and graphic designer from Berlin. His works include books (“Handbuch der wildwachsenden Großstadtpflanzen”, 2007, and „Cloud Studies“, 2011) as well as exhibitions (“Cloud Studies”, shown in Germany, Switzerland, Italy and the Netherlands, 2010-15). His research on the Japanese scientist Masanao Abe was shown in Japan (“Masanao Abe: The Movement of the Clouds around Mount Fuji”, 2015). In Fall 2015, Völter’s book on Abe will be published by Spector Books, Leipzig. “Masanao Abe Cloudgraphy” is Völter’s first film. (Source)
Apollo Six (2015) // Laura Heit //
8 min 14 sec // Hand drawn and stop motion animation, live action footage //
Synopsis:
A glimpse of earth at a turbulent time from the window of an unmanned spacecraft.
Apollo Six launched in 1968 and immediately experienced bad vibrations causing it to burn its engines and fall into a strange orbit. Its command service module survived and landed 10 hours after its launch, 43 miles off target in the waters off Hawaii.
Hand drawn and cut out animation, live action footage.
Music: Dots and Lines. Composition by Jordan Dykstra, performed by the Jordan Dykstra Large Ensemble
Artist Bio:
Laura Heit is an multidisciplinary artist who has lived in Portland, Oregon, since 2011. Her films and installations have been seen at; Adams and Ollman Portland, The Schnitzer Museum of Art Eugene, Boise Art Museum, She Works Flexible Houston, REDCAT Los Angeles, Walker Art Center Minneapolis, MOMA NYC, Millennium Film NYC, Pompidou Paris, TBA Festival Portland, and the Guggenheim Museum. She was a 2016 Oregon Arts Council Individual Artist Fellow and has received grants and awards including; Artist Project Grant Regional Arts & Culture Council including the 2014 Innovation Award, Henson Foundation (2009, 2014), ARC California, Illinois Arts Council, Puppeteers of America, Thames and Hudson, The British Council, and the Mac Dowell Colony. She was the co-director of the Experimental Animation Program at Cal Arts, and currently teaches at Pacific Northwest College of Art.