// Mythic Age //

// Friday, December 1st, 2017 //
// Woodland Pattern Book Center //
// 720 E Locust St, Milwaukee, WI //

Odysseus and the Oceanic Feeling (2017)

// Dakota Nanton // 25 minutes 15 seconds // video //

Synopsis:
A queer contemporary reimagining of the Odyssey. Odysseus wracked with guilt for the loss of his crew returns home in search of a lost love.

Artist Bio:
Dakota Nanton is an experimental animator based out of Boulder, Colorado. His artwork and films draw inspiration from such diverse areas as comic books, folklore, science fiction, religious imagery and art history. Borrowing from the images and iconographies of the past, and mixing old techniques with new, he explores the complexities and contradictions of living in the modern world. His work has been exhibited all around the world and is held in permanent collections in the United States, Canada, Italy, Australia, Egypt and New Zealand.

Every Angle is an Angel (2016)

// Shana Moulton // 6 minutes 18 seconds // video //

Synopsis:
Every Angle is an Angel (2016) 6'18" was originally developed as a site-specific video installation for the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. It features the artist's alter-ego, Cynthia, on a mental journey triggered by the breakfast cereal Special K. The title of the work is quoted from the personal accounts from Journeys into the Bright World(1978), a book by Marcia Moore who chronicled her mind- and body-altering, therapeutical experiences with the drug ketamine.

Artist Bio:
Shana Moulton lives and works near Yosemite, California. Over the past 15 years she has been developing her ongoing video/performance series Whispering Pines, in which she plays the role of "Cynthia", both a fictional figure and the artist's alter ego. Moulton has had solo exhibitions or performances at MoMA, The New Museum, Performa 2009, The Kitchen, Electronic Arts Intermix, Art in General, SmackMellon, The Andy Warhol Museum, SFMOMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Hammer Museum, MOCA Cleveland, The Wexner Center for the Arts, The Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Palais De Tokyo in Paris, The Migros Museum in Zurich, Kunsthaus Glarus, Fondazione Morra Greco in Naples and the Times Museum in Guangzhou. Moulton's work has been reviewed in the Village Voice, Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, Artnet Magazine, Frieze Magazine, Art Review, Artpress, Flash Art and The Fresno Bee. She is a featured artist at Electronic Arts Intermix and Art21.

Inertia (2007)

// Jake Mahaffy // 1 minute 28 seconds // 16mm transferred to video //

Synopsis:
a series of ongoing experiments

Artist Bio:
Jake Mahaffy's self-produced, micro-budget shorts and features were made single-handedly, featuring untrained actors in rural settings. More recent projects combined with professional actors and crew have also screened internationally. Venues include Sundance (2004/05/06/08/09/15), Venice (2012, 2016 & Orizzonti Prize for Best Film, 2015), and SXSW (2016, Grand Jury Prize, 2008). He founded two new filmmaking programs at two universities as an Associate Professor of Film and Art in the United States and currently coordinates the Screen Production program at Auckland University in New Zealand.

Window (2013/2014)

// Ailbhe Ní Bhriain // 9 minutes 3 seconds // video & CGI composite //

Synopsis:
Window is characterised by a series of slow, continuous tracking shots through which pictorial and geographical instability gradually unfold. The tension between stillness and movement and between real and constructed space is key to the film. Camera motion is achieved using a virtual camera within reconstructed still images, later combined with CGI, 3D scanning and chromakeyed imagery.

Window  conjures an uncertain place, caught between interior and exterior settings. Set within an abandoned architectural interior, an unlikely ‘other’ place is suggested by projections, rudimentary props and glimpsed exteriors. It is left unstated whether these elements are imaginary ideals in the process of being constructed or the remnants of a place or vision come undone.
 
The work is loosely based, in terms of its thematics and the landscapes referenced, on the story of Antonin Artaud’s ill-fated 1937 trip to Ireland – a journey that began as visionary pilgrimage and retreat and ended as an episode of degradation and deportation. Of interest is the idea of what remains when the ideal collides with the real in this way, and the resonance of this to the contemporary representation of landscape.

Artist Bio:
Ailbhe Ní Bhriain is an Irish artist who works with film and photography. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Domobaal Gallery, London UK (2017); The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon, IRL (2017); and RHA, Dublin, IRL (2016), as well as group exhibitions in The Broad Museum, Michigan; The Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork; Paris Photo, Paris; Podroom Gallery, Belgrade; and VideoProject 17, Nantes & Angers (all 2016/17).  
Ailbhe lectures at the Crawford College of Art & Design, Cork and her work is represented by Domobaal Gallery, London. 

Zero Gravity (2013) Nadja Verena Marcin

// Nadja Verena Marcin // 2 minutes 32 seconds // video performance and 2K Digital Cinema //

Synopsis:
Zero Gravity is a video-performance that imaginatively combines art and science. Floating weightless in a plane over Florida, Marcin revisits Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‚Die Frohliche Wissenschaft‘, going beyond the assertion that ‘God is dead’ to explore the deep emotional quality of the text: ‘What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually?  Backward, sideward, forward in any direction? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing?’ The emotionality and gravity of the text finds expression, simultaneously Marcin is hindered through the physical release of endorphins, which she sees as a metaphor for the omnipresent triumph of ‘The Society of the Spectacle’ (1967, Debord). Zero Gravity is a work of art that takes the audience to a new level of consciousness of both body and mind.

Artist Bio:
Nadja Verena Marcin is a German artist who graduated from the Visual Art Department of New Genre, School of the Arts at Columbia University in New York in 2010, and received a Diploma of Fine Arts from the Department of New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Münster. Her work has been screened and she has performed in venues including among others NADA New York; Garage- Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; Berkeley Art Museum; Zendai MOMA, China; Ludwig Museum, Germany; 5th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art; ICA Philadelphia; GOETHE Center, Bolivia; The Solo Project Basel. Marcin has been awarded numerous grants including Franklin Furnace Grant, NYC; Emergency Grant of Foundation for Contemporary Arts, NYC; Stiftung Kunstfonds, Bonn, Germany. Her work has been featured in Texte zur Kunst, Artforum, Huffington Post, Interview Magazine, Artnet, VICE Creator's Project. Marcin’s lectures include the MFA program in Digital and Interdisciplinary Art Practice at CUNY (City College of New York); the MFA program for Performance and Interactive media Arts, Brooklyn College, New York; and the P.I. Arts Center, New York for Video and New Media. Marcin is also the Founder and Creative Director of Kunstraum LLC, an interdisciplinary team of curators, artists and architects that promotes local and international art and outstanding art concepts that in 2016 won the “Artspace Fairgoer Award” at NADA art fair in New York. She is based in New York City and North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany.