If Effort Would Help
Thursday, January 26th, 2017 -- 7:00 PM
Woodland Pattern Book Center
720 E Locust St, Milwaukee, WI 53212
Event is free, donations are strongly suggested to help support Woodland Pattern and the screening artists.
William Lamson -- Selected Actions, 5 min, (2008)
From 2007-2008, I worked on a series of short videos in my studio that I later grouped under the title Actions. Using inexpensive materials like balloons, wood, ribbon, bb guns, gravity and my own body, I arranged these objects to create scenarios in which there exists a balance between two opposing forces. A single catalytic action destabilizes this balance, and the forces then work against each other until one is exhausted and they return to a state of equilibrium. Within these set ups, there exists a sense of inevitability, a deterministic endpoint that I as the artist intend and the viewer anticipates. Yet the nature of experimentation and the variables that exist within each performance ensures the unexpected. The tension between what we anticipate and what actually happens reflects the feelings of frustration and satisfaction that I experience through my actions as a performer. In the end, the only underlying constant is that the present state is about to change: something is going to happen.
Artist Bio:
William Lamson is an interdisciplinary artist whose diverse practice involves working with elemental forces to create durational performative actions. Set in landscapes as varied as New York’s East River and Chile’s Atacama Desert, his projects reveal the invisible systems and forces at play within these sites. In all of his projects, Lamson’s work represents a performative gesture, a collaboration with forces outside of his control to explore systems of knowledge and belief. Lamson’s work has been exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, including the Brooklyn Musuem, The Moscow Biennial, P.S.1. MOMA, Kunsthalle Erfurt, the Musuem of Contemporary Art, Denver, and Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles. In addition he has produced site specific installations for the Indianapolis Musuem of Art, the Center For Land Use Interpretation, and Storm King Art Center. His work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Musuem of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and a number of private collections. He has been awarded grants from the Shifting Foundation, the Experimental Television Center, and most recently he is 2014 Guggenheim Fellow. His work has appeared in ArtForum, Frieze, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, Harpers, and the Village Voice. William Lamson was born Arlington, Virginia and lives in Brooklyn, New York. He earned his MFA from Bard College, and he teaches in the Parsons MFA photography program and at the School of Visual Arts.
Rashid Johnson -- Black Yoga, 4.5 min, (2010)
A lone man executes intricately flowing yoga movements in a verdant park. His carefully-choreographed show of athleticism constantly veers in and out a performance of the everyday and a highly aestheticized abstraction of the male form.
Artist Bio:
Rashid Johnson was born in Chicago in 1977 and attended Collumbia College and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His practice encompasses photography, multimedia sculpture and audio installation, paintings, and filmic works that deftly weave personal history into larger narratives of African American experience. He has exhibited internationally at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Sculpture Center, the International Center for Photography, David Kordanski Gallery, and The Whitney Museum. Black Yoga is presented courtesy of the Artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Kevin Jerome Everson -- Rita Larson's Boy, 11 min, (2012)
Rita Larson’s Boy (2012) portrays ten actors auditioning for the role of Rollo Larson in the 1970s sitcom Sanford and Son. Rita Larson’s Boy is one of three films included in the Tombigbee Chronicles Number Two. The series of films are based on famous people and objects from Columbus, Mississippi, my parent’s hometown. The actor Nathaniel Taylor raised in Columbus portrayed Rollo Larson (Rita Larson’s boy) in the series Sanford and Son. Tombigbee is the river the runs though Columbus. (10:53, b&w)
Artist Bio:
Artist/Filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson (b.1965) was born and raised in Mansfield Ohio He has a MFA from Ohio University and a BFA from the University of Akron. He is currently a Professor of Art at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville Virginia. He has made eight feature length films and over one-hundred and twenty short films, including such award winning films as Park Lanes (2015), The Island of Saint Matthews (2013), Erie (2010), Quality Control (2011), Ten Five in the Grass (2012), Cinnamon (2006), Spicebush (2005), Stone (2013), Pictures From Dorothy (2004), Century (2013), Fe26 (2014), Sound That 20014), Sugarcoated Arsenic (2013) with Claudrena Harold and Emergency Needs (2007). Most recently he has presented the eight-hour long film, Park Lanes (2015). He also has a DVD box set of his films called Broad Daylight and Other Times with a catalog distributed by Video Data Bank.
Everson’s films and artwork have been widely shown, at venues including Sundance Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Oberhausen Film Festival, Venice International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Whitechapel Gallery in London, National Gallery in Washington DC and Centre Pompidou in Paris. The work has also been recognized through awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Alpert Award, a Creative Capital Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, NEH Fellowships, Ohio Arts Council Fellowships, and an American Academy in Rome Prize.
William Wylie -- Four Walls (for Billy Johnson), 3 min, (2016)
During the Homecoming dance at the small rural Prairie School in eastern Colorado, the high school football team celebrates the crowning of the king by performing the Wooble.
Artist Bio:
William Wylie’s photographs and short films have been shown both nationally and internationally. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, and Yale University Art Museum, among others. He has published four books of his work: Riverwalk, Stillwater, Carrara and Route 36. A new book, Prairie, is scheduled for publication in 2017. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a VMFA Professional Fellowship and the Yale Gallery of Art’s Doran / LeWitt Fellowship in 2012 and 2014. He lives in Charlottesville where he teaches photography and is the Director of the Studio Art Department at the University of Virginia.
Mike Mills -- Deformer, 17 min, (1996)
A portrait about the skateboarder Ed Templeton and his art career. Shot in Ed's hometown of Huntington Beach, California, Deformer offers glimpses into the locale, culture, and adolescence that inspire and are Templeton's body and art.
Artist Bio:
Mike Mills was born in Berkeley, California in 1966. He graduated from Cooper Union in 1989. Mike Mills works as a filmmaker, graphic designer, and artist. Mills is best known for his independent films Beginners (2011) and Thumbsucker (2005) as well as his exhibitions at the Alleged Gallery, which were documented in the book, exhibition and film “Beautiful Losers”.
Mills wrote and directed Thumbsucker (2005), which won awards at both the Sundance Film Festival and Berlin International Film Festival, in addition to winning the Guardian New Directors award at the Edinburgh Film Festival. His second feature, which he wrote and directed, Beginners (2011), won Best Film and Best Ensemble Cast at the Gotham Awards and was nominated for best director, best screenplay, and best supporting actor by the Independent Spirit Awards. Christopher Plummer won the Oscar for best supporting actor (2012).
William Lamson -- Vital Capacity, 8 min, (2007)
The term vital capacity refers to the maximum amount of air that can be exhaled from a person’s lung in a single breath. In the video, I attempt to prevent falling balloons from exploding on a mask of pins that I am wearing by blowing them upward.
Artist Bio:
William Lamson is an interdisciplinary artist whose diverse practice involves working with elemental forces to create durational performative actions. Set in landscapes as varied as New York’s East River and Chile’s Atacama Desert, his projects reveal the invisible systems and forces at play within these sites. In all of his projects, Lamson’s work represents a performative gesture, a collaboration with forces outside of his control to explore systems of knowledge and belief. Lamson’s work has been exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, including the Brooklyn Museum, The Moscow Biennial, P.S.1. MOMA, Kunsthalle Erfurt, the Musuem of Contemporary Art, Denver, and Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles. In addition he has produced site specific installations for the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Center For Land Use Interpretation, and Storm King Art Center. His work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Musuem of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and a number of private collections. He has been awarded grants from the Shifting Foundation, the Experimental Television Center, and most recently he is 2014 Guggenheim Fellow. His work has appeared in ArtForum, Frieze, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, Harpers, and the Village Voice. William Lamson was born Arlington, Virginia and lives in Brooklyn, New York. He earned his MFA from Bard College, and he teaches in the Parsons MFA photography program and at the School of Visual Arts.