| Forging the Future |

| 7:00 PM | Friday, June 2, 2023 |
| Woodland Pattern Book Center |
| 720 E Locust St | Milwaukee, WI |

If you are not local to Milwaukee, or cannot make the screening, please continue to support Woodland Pattern by browsing their online bookstore!

Takahiro Suzuki
Takahiro Suzuki (he/him/his) is an artist currently residing in Milwaukee, WI (USA).  He completed his BA in Studio Art from the University of Virginia concentrating in the media of photography and cinematography, and received his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  His work and research practices as an artist are a constant endeavor of questioning. Each investigation offers a path toward further curiosity, rather than an inching grasp toward certainty, where the end product is not so much a thesis upon which to land, but rather, an open hypothesis for the audience to consider.   His works have exhibited and screened nationally and internationally

Janelle VanderKelen
Janelle VanderKelen’s films and intermedia installations imagine alternative acts of relation between imperfect bodies (human, vegetal, geological, or otherwise) and make visible the agency of plants through experimental time-based media processes. She received both her MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres and her MA in Intermedia Art from the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. Her films have screened at Athens International Film + Video Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, True/False Film Festival, Revelation Perth International Film Festival, IC DOCS, San Diego Underground Film Festival, and Antimatter [Media Art] Film Festival.

infinite horizon [Takahiro Suzuki]

2 min 27 sec, 35mm Photographs to Video + Sound

Synopsis:
An homage to the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, infinite horizon attempts to create a panoramic stitch of photographs depicting the balance of water and air using handheld photography. Except unlike Sugimoto’s Seascapes, these attempts ultimately fail and the flawed execution is seen as it scrolls by. Accompanied by text from The Open Studio by Susan Stewart, infinite horizon is a meditative contemplation on time and certainty.

Clara: Forever Summer [Janelle VanderKelen]

8 min,  Video + Sound

Synopsis:
The repetitive motions of the canning process quietly remap the accreted horrors of female labor that intervenes in the lifespan of a vegetable arrested in forever-summer. A circuitous wandering explores this process and confuses conceptions of time and space as seasons accumulate into undifferentiated years of feminine relation to and reinvention of natural growth cycles. The physical constraints of the domestic and embodied architectures are eventually completely subverted by the excessive act of preservation.

Beneath the burden We place upon It. [Takahiro Suzuki]

10 min 30 sec, Video + Sound

Synopsis:
“More and more I sense that Nature itself is groaning and collapsing beneath the burden we place upon it.” — W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants

A brief document on the history of the Iron Ridge Mine, now more commonly known as the Neda Mine. The film operates as a cautionary on how humans find flaws or are flawed in the quest for innovation or conservation.

Language Unknown [Janelle VanderKelen]

6 min 10 sec,  16 mm Transferred to Video + Sound

Synopsis:
Language Unknown embraces plant sentience as fact and speculates how beings of the vegetal variety might approach interspecies communication with humans (who are far more sensorially limited). Leaves, mycelia, and roots playfully examine how humans experience the world, and the (supposedly) silent watchers consider what language those swift blurs of human might possibly understand.

A Valley Without Trees [Janelle VanderKelen]

5 min 56 sec,  16 mm Transferred to Video + Sound

Synopsis:
In A Valley Without Trees, the lowly onion that burrows into the soil and spends most of its life underground is cast as an interpreter or potential sensory prosthetic that offers a different way of understanding (and perhaps communicating with) the land, planet, and cosmos in which it grows.

electric moonlight & the language within the leaves [Takahiro Suzuki]

7 min 55 sec, Super8 Transferred to Video + Sound

Synopsis:
a modern re-telling of the japanese tale of the bamboo cutter and the moon princess. the moon princess listens to the untold intelligence of the cosmos as observed by the trees to become closer with and eventually return home.


Horizon [Takahiro Suzuki]

6 min 22 sec, Video + Sound

Synopsis:
Akin to Eadweard Muybridge’s motion study photographs, Horizon uses the interlaced video format of VHS to create a stuttering motion capture of a figure passing through the landscape.