• From Future’s End •

• Friday, February 1, 2019 •
• 7:00 pm •

• Woodland Pattern Book Center •
• 720 E Locust St Milwaukee, WI 53212 •

Sun Notations • Krista Steinke • 2016 - 2018
8 min 23 sec • video

Synopsis:
Audio by Matt Steinke.  Production Assistant: Ashley Lane and Annie Sungkajun

Sun Notations is an experimental video that animates over 50 still photographs – a work that merges a primitive photographic process (pinhole) with new technology. The original photographs capture the pathway of the sun rising and setting over time, with exposures that last one day up to an entire year. Here time and space expand, overlap, and then dissipate as clusters of dust appear like stars, insects fall from the sky, the landscape morphs into abstraction, and the sun traces across the screen like a drawing in motion. Throughout the work, references to creation and destruction call attention to our immediate present but also to the grim possibility that our planet may not have a “forever”.

Artist Bio:
Krista Steinke is an artist who works in photography, video, and installation. Her project-based practice explores the human-environmental relationship and photography’s unique role in mediating that experience.

Krista has exhibited and screened her work in museums, galleries, and film festivals across the country, as well as internationally. Her works are represented in public and private collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Woodmere Museum in Philadelphia, the Brauer Museum of Art, Atlanta International Airport, Johnson & Johnson Corporation, and Fidelity Investments, among others. She is the recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship, a grant from the Puffin Foundation, an Artist Residency at Light Work, a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and most notably, a Fellowship in Photography from the Howard Foundation. She has been been invited to be a visiting artist at numerous colleges and graduate schools and has participated in several photo festivals and conferences either as an exhibitor, speaker, or curator, including The International Digital Media and Arts Association (iDMAA), Denver Month of Photography, Fotofest, The Invision Photo Festival, and Society for Photographic Education (SPE).

Krista received a BA in Art and the Advanced Humanities from Valparaiso University, a BFA in Studio Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a MFA in Photography and Digital Imaging from The Maryland Institute, College of Art. She has lived all over Texas, in New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Seattle, and Chicago, among other places.  Currently, she divides her time between Houston and New York state.

Salt Bath for Iron and Copper • Heini Aho • 2018
3 min 20 sec • site- specific installation
copper, iron, salt, lemon, water, mixed media

Synopsis:
Salt bath for Iron and Copper is a documentation of site-specific installation build in Pori, Finland, as a part of Pori Biennale 2018/ Centennial.

The turquoise color of the metal sheets in Pori made me think of the ocean, and those old oasis of healthcare, spas. I made a shower room for iron and copper into the cube. Iron gathers an amazing orange rust and copper becomes greenish with different shades of turquoise. The work functions like a fountain, but it looks like a profuse stream of shower.

It is terrible to watch water just running down the drain. We should always close the tap, we are living in times when the prospect of running out of tap water is present.

I was offered a chance to place my work into an extraordinary glass cube in the city center. The cube is owned by an aquarium shop located on the same yard and without a doubt it has been designed for advertising. However, the cube is rather large to be an advertisement space and too small to be a room.

The streets of the city center are asphalted, made for humans and cars to use. Of course there are communities of different organisms, insects and mycelium, but there is also different materials mined from the nature and lives of these materials. The glass cube where I will build my work, has changed during the years that have passed. Its metallic parts have got a beautiful green patina. In fact quite new constructions from about 60’s and 70’s often seem older than they actually are because of pretty patina.

One day an idea of a shower popped into my head and I was instantly pretty sure that this is it. It is wonderful when it happens, it does not happen every time, a plan that you don’t need to question, you can just make it. How you start to trust into an idea, it is hard to say, the trust builds up through reasoning and from different sources. It does not always have to be perfect, you don’t need to criticize it at that point, all of its details appear to your mind simultaneously as one image, as a precise sketch.

I will make a shower room for iron and copper into the cube. I will build a fake floor to hide the equipment needed. The work functions like a fountain, but it looks like a profuse stream of shower. It is terrible to watch water just running down the drain. We should always close the tap, we are living in times when the prospect of running out of tap water is present.

The turquoise color of the metal sheets in Pori made me think of the ocean, and those old oasis of healthcare, spas. Major part of the water resources on the globe is salty seawater. Seawaves eating away the cliffs cause erosion and the seawater even gets most of its salt from the ground. Salty water on the other hand corrodes and erodes different materials. This spa is actually not for the first view good for the materials laying under it, salt water causes strong reaction on iron and copper, and this noticeable even for human beings after some time. Iron gathers an amazing orange rust and copper becomes greenish with different shades of turquoise.

I often work with seemingly lifeless things and materials. Those kind of things that don’t have a face to smile back at people. In fact the biggest motivation for me to work with these materials, is to take distance from the complexity of the human specie. I chose a shower, that takes it shape after the shower for human beings, but the materials bathing under this shower react differently than humans. Because the work recycles the water, the water is likely to get rusty during the week, it may vaporize and evaporate during a hot summer day. Iron and copper bathe inside this water running aquarium and patina is the most visible reaction, a substitute of a smile, that we can sense and observe.

Artist Bio:
Heini Aho (born 1979 in Turku) combines elements of sculpture, installation and the moving image into works addressing issues of space and perceptions of the environment. In her works, the analytical meets the intuitive, and the material meets the immaterial. Aho’s method is based on observing a concrete phenomenon and the law-like characteristics of the material. A subtly light-hearted tone typical of the artist is present in them; it may be a touch of humour, wonderment with an element of joie de vivre to it, or a surprising feeling of freedom before ordinary matters. 

Heini Aho graduated from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2015, and the Turku Academy of Arts in 2003. In recent years, her work has been on show in solo exhibitions, such as The Square Elephant at the Galeria Anhava in Helsinki,  The Primary Force Behind an Everyday Experience at the Titanik Gallery in Turku, Playing with the Dragon at Forum Box in Helsinki and More Black at the Small Projects Gallery in Tromsö. She has also participated in various group exhibitions, including Fin Between at the Arena 1 Gallery in Santa Monica in Los Angeles, meta/data/morphosis at the Or Gallery in Berlin and The Hunters Group: Heart Side Up at Kunsthalle Helsinki.
In 2016, Aho was awarded the main prize of the William Thuring Foundation.

L’Internationale • Marianna Milhorat • 2010
9 min 10 sec • 16mm to DV

Synopsis:
Futuristic factories and boreholes harvesting geothermal steam serve as beacons of familiarity in the face of an unknown future.

Artist Bio:
Marianna Milhorat is a Montréal-based filmmaker and educator, originating from Vermont, USA. She received her MFA from the University of Illinois-Chicago in 2012 and BFA from the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinéma at Concordia University in 2007. Working in film and video, she examines culture through the increasingly complex and interconnected relationships between human and non-human nature, while disrupting and transforming notions of space and perspective.

Milhorat has presented her work at festivals and galleries worldwide, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Whitechapel Gallery, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Videonale, VideoEx, and the Museum of Contemporary Art- Chicago. She was the recipient of the Cinematic Vision Award at Images Festival and Best Experimental Film at the Chicago Underground Film Festival. Her work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and Finlandia Foundation National.

Perfumes and Caresses • Laura Iancu • 2016
4 min 30 sec • video

Synopsis:
The theatre of attachment to aspirational heteronormativity played out in scenes of clinical self-assessment

Artist Bio:
Laura Iancu is a visual artist working primarily with virtual reality, non-fiction& experimental video forms and immersive 3D animation, with an expanded practice of installation, photography, and graphic design. She is foremost concerned with the impulses behind the digital conservation of matter (an archival tendency) and the technologies that underwrite aspects of digital translation and mediation.

Emergency Broadcast • Pixie Cram • 2017
7 min • video

Synopsis:
Built at the height of the Cold War to withstand a five-megaton nuclear assault, the Diefenbunker is a massive underground, four-storey, 100,000-square-foot fortress designed and constructed entirely in secrecy in 1959. Inspired by the objects, rooms, and spaces of this Canadian Historic Site, the stop-animation film imagines the beginning of a nuclear war.

Artist Bio:
Pixie Cram is a filmmaker and animator who lives in the Ottawa-Gatineau region. She creates work on themes of nature, technology, and war. Her films have screened at festivals across North America and in Europe and have aired on CBC TV. On top of her own art practice, she works as a freelance director, cinematographer and editor.

Gathering Dust • Alex Goss • 2018
5 min 39 sec • HD video

Synopsis:
Within an industrial facility, a chimeric relationship between a machine and its operator set the stage for an unexpected ecosystem to emerge. A byproduct of production, this "other thing", is the ephemeral exchange between human and tool. Secrets are forged in the space between lines of code, glitches, and pools of coolant. These moments offer beginnings for new tools, reorientations with possibility for new relationships.

Artist Bio:
Alex Goss (b. 1991, Houston, TX) received a BFA from the Cooper Union in New York  City. After attending a residency at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Goss  returned to Houston to learn from its manufacturing trades in the energy and medical  fields. He currently fabricates industrial grade 3D printers and medical devices. Goss has  held solo exhibitions in New York, Baltimore, and Houston. Goss is the organizer of  Moonmist, an artist-run project space in Houston, Texas.

The Art of Flying • Jan Van IJken • 2015
7 min • video

Synopsis:
Short film about “murmurations”: the mysterious flights of the Common Starling. It is still unknown how the thousands of birds are able to fly in such dense swarms without colliding. Every night the starlings gather at dusk to perform their stunning air show.

Because of the relatively warm winter of 2014/2015, the starlings stayed in the Netherlands instead of migrating southwards. This gave filmmaker Jan van IJken the opportunity to film one of the most spectacular and amazing natural phenomena on earth.

Artist Bio:
Jan van IJken is a photographer / filmmaker from the Netherlands. He is self-taught and is working mainly autonomously on long-term projects. As a photographer, he developed a strong eye for natural light, composition and detail. Lately he has become more and more interested in human-animal relationships, nature and microscopy.