// fAUXkumentary //
// March 4th, 2017 // 7:00 pm //
// Woodland Pattern Book Center // 720 E Locust St Milwaukee, WI 53212 //
COW TRAILS OR THE MOON (2012)
Abby Sun, 15 min, HD digital video
Two boys, their dogs, and a 24-pack of PBR.
Artist Bio:
Abby Sun, who originally hails from Columbia, MO, is a photographer, filmmaker, sound recordist, and lover of road trips. She is the photography editor for Nat. Brut and a programmer for True/False Film Fest.
PEELING THE VOICE OFF THE IMAGE (2011)
Iris Tenkink, 7 minutes 30 seconds, Video
Below this film runs another
What constitutes an image? An image that is in itself a beginning - 'a snapshot of a passing reality' and I wonder what is next, what does the image unfold?
The potential for rupture that my suturing implied is in constant threat for either sound or image to leave the other and diverge beyond retrieval.
Artist Bio:
Graduated from MFA Art Writing at Goldsmith University London in 2012, I currently work as artist and editor in the Netherlands. My works have been screened at:
EXiS Experimental Film and Video Festival, Seoul, (South Korea) 2013
Digital Arts Festival Taipei, (Taiwan) 2012
Experiments in Cinema v 7.9 Festival Albuquerque, (USA) 2012
Whitechapel Gallery London: Art Writing Seminar Series, (UK) 2012
Chisenhale Gallery Art writing event: And there it is. London, (UK) 2011
MADATAC 02 festival 2010 Madrid, (Spain) 2010
Zebra International Poetry Film festival, berlin, (Germany) 2008
Aurora festival 2008 ‘The infinite measure’ Norwich, (UK) 2008
APPROXIMATIONS (2016)
Ghislaine Leung, 8 minutes 38 seconds, Stereo Audio
Approximations came out of, and in this sense, is, my desire to write inclusively, or perhaps better to write without exclusion, where information had parity, was all material, seamless and framed, touching and pulling back. A writing not so much produced but lived on the tongue, tuned to a speed and temperature. Where images are felt against the skin, made moribund and loved.
Artist Bio:
Artist and writer Ghislaine Leung, lives and works in London and Brussels. Recent projects include 078746844 at WIELS, Brussels, Soft Open Shut at Studio Voltaire, Le Bourgeois at 3236rls, Re: Re:, Montague, Violent Incident, Vleeshal, Middelburg, Prosu(u)mer, EKKM, Tallinn and Performance Capture, Stedelijk, Amsterdam. Recent writings in LA.NL, Amsterdam and Pure Fiction's Dysfiction, Frankfurt. Leung is editor of Versuch Press and member of PUBLIKATIONEN + EDITIONEN. She was resident at Hospitalfield Summer 2016 and has a solo exhibition at Cell Project Space, London forthcoming in 2017.
LANDSCAPE WITH TWO WOMEN (2013)
Brenda Miller, 4 minutes 58 seconds, Video
Brenda Miller is curious about the current rejuvenation of knitting at the present time and what is the relationship of domestic arts to art practice. The film, Landscape with two women is a celebration of two expert knitters in conversation about skills where they talk passionately about their shared interests.
The film considers the language of knitting used in the construction of lace shawls and intarsia socks worked by two expert amateur knitters. A celebration of their skills is reflected in their conversation demonstrating their passion and skill.
The inspiration for the film comes from the painting by William Dyce, Welsh Landscape with two women knitting (1860). The painting is described as: a romanticised Victorian view of ‘wild Wales’ and its ‘unspoilt’ people. Knitting was an occupation for the home and the need for hand knitting was already beginning to die out by the 1860s.
Artist Bio:
Based in Gloucestershire in the UK, graduated in Creative Textiles at Bath Spa University in 1996 and received her MFA in Art Practice in 2009 from Goldsmiths College, University of London and currently working towards a PhD at The University of Wolverhampton. She has shown moving image, textiles and installation in the UK, Europe and USA. Brenda Miller is interested in the historical representation of art through textiles, its links to craft and domesticity and its relationship to current practice. Collaborates with both professional and amateur women to create documentary style films. The intimacy of exchange that occurs between people working with textiles is central to my research which proposed that film might provide a reflexive means through which to critically reflect on the tactile process of making (alone and/or with others).
Tina in the Nail Salon (2015)
Metrah Pashaee, 6 minutes 30 seconds, Video
Synopsis:
Shot on location at V's Nail Studio, Iowa City, IA, this moving image portrait glimpses the sights and sounds of Tina's work day: a space of labor, body, beauty and color.
Artist Bio:
Originally residing from the Sunshine State, I am a Middle Eastern-American audio-visual artist and independent filmmaker currently completing my MFA in Film and Video Production at the University of Iowa. As an Iowa Arts Fellowship recipient, a Graduate Teaching Assistant, and a receiver of the 2015 Princess Grace Foundation’s Graduate Film Award, I devote my time and attention to crafting unconventional audio-visual production.
Exercising a keen interest in generating provocative and thoughtful image and sound design, I strive to make experimentally formal and conceptually nuanced work. Utilizing a multitude of techniques to record and collect audio and visual content, my films showcase an assembly of complex and playful collage.
My work investigates critically relevant dilemmas of identity formation, intersectional feminist issues, the sociopolitical burdens tied to the human agent, and how in the act of mediation the potential to derive an alternative way to perceive and define the body arises. Reoccurring themes present in my work involve the subject of human and non-human bodies: the body as an agent of action, the body as a tabooed vessel, the body as a site of uncertainty.
My unconventional films have screened at various national and international cinematic and media art venues: The Images Film and Music Festival, Microscope Gallery, the Black Maria Film Festival + Tour, Lausanne Underground Film Festival, the Anthology Film Archives and the Antimatter Media Arts Festival among others.
We are all alone Fariba! (2016)
Mona Sheybani, 9 minutes, Video
Synopsis:
“We are all alone Fariba!” depicts women walking through a crowd of people in a holy mosque in Iran. The film explores the experience of entering somewhere that is culturally not accessible to non-Muslims. Taking photographs or video is forbidden inside the Shrine of Imam Reza. My trip to the mosque was planned from the United States and I kept questioning my family members back in Iran whether I could sneak in a GoPro or a camera pen but I didn’t want to take the risk to get caught. At that moment the best option was to record the video with my old cellphone and hope for the best.
Artist Bio:
Mona Sheybani, a Los Angeles based artist, received her Master of Fine Arts Degree at the University of California, Irvine in 2016 and a Bachelor's of Fine Arts Degree in Photography from Otis College of Art & Design in 2013. Sheybani's photography delivers unique visual and emotional references to subject matter of Iran. Sheybani has been featured in various exhibtions such as Of Water, Santa Monica College, The Graduates, ArtLa Gallery, YOU ∩ ME, Helen and Abraham Bolsky Gallery and the Museum of Latin American Art. Sheybani's curatorial projects include Work, Leisure, Labor, and Idleness, and Invading Privacy. She has been interviewed on Kirin Iran Radio and has been braodcasted on VoA Persian.
Work by Portia Cobb
Tenderness (2006) 3 minutes 35 seconds, Video
A Crowing Hen (2008) 3 minutes 45 seconds, Video
Eji Ogbe Ifa (2003) 2 minutes 39 seconds, Video
from Tenderness
from A Crowing Hen
from Eji Ogbe Ifa
Synopses:
// Tenderness //
This video is constructed of orphaned footage from an educational film found at The Bemis Art Center in Nebraska while I was an artist in residence. I had written a memoir about an acquaintance after learning of her sudden and tragic death. I wanted to illustrate a fleeting visual image I would always have of a time I spent at her home in Dakar, Senegal. This work is meant to be poetic. That is where my work has begun with poetry and later with imagery. I dub my own voice to tell this story, but because I am so self-conscious, have thought often of recording other women's voices that have texture. I believe there is an aura in this work and I love looking at my own added performative elements within it. I also have made other versions using a recording of ritual music (Santeria from Cuba) but later returned to the original music from the film which would be of the Bahia's Candomble spiritual community.
// A Crowing Hen //
This was created as a memorial for a sister artist, Gelsy Verna, but is informed by African Retentions & practices still alive within Gullah Geechee cultural identity.
// Eji Ogbe Ifa //
A short experimental performance that I directed and recorded by setting up my camera to record This Yoruba priest doing a reading of an Odu (a poetic Yoruba parable about 3 travelers leaving heaven to return to"suffering market" (life on earth). This poem was a source of inspiration and inquiry for imagery and story in other works I've done.
Artist Bio:
Portia Cobb is a video artist and producer of short experimental documentary whose videos and installations have been exhibited nationally and internationally. Although trained as a filmmaker, she began using video because of its accessibility and immediacy in the field. Her work often investigates the politics of place and identity. Through her continuing documentation of urban and rural communities in America and West Africa, she draws upon memory and history "as a means of confronting forced movement and forgetting."