Not Similar to Anything, Just Similar
"The White Cat, Hunter and Killer, could hide in snow and sunlight on white walls and clouds and rocks."
--William Burroughs, from Michael T Taussig's Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative
Thursday, December 8th 2016 -- 7:00 PM
Woodland Pattern Book Center
720 E Locust St
Milwaukee, WI, 53212
Burial Pyramid (1974)
Ana Mendieta
3 min 17 sec, Super-8mm transferred to high definition digital media
Courtesy of Galerie Lelong and the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC
She breathes deeper and deeper, and the rocks become unstable and begin to roll off her until she is mostly uncovered — breathing normally by the end of the film, free from the rocky burden, resting in her earthen bed.
Synopsis excerpt from "Ana Mendieta Comes Alive in Her Films" by Sheila Dickinson
Artist Bio:
Born in Havana, Cuba, Ana Mendieta was exiled from her native country in 1961, just before the outbreak of the Cuban Revolution. Much of Mendieta's work expresses the pain and rupture of cultural displacement, and resonates with visceral metaphors of death, rebirth, and spiritual transformation. A seminal figure in feminist art practice of the 1970s, Mendieta devised an emblematic, at times mythical female iconography.
Bio excerpt from Electronic Arts Intermix
Yucca/Body (2010)
Nika Kaiser
24 sec, stop motion animation
With a simple gesture of animation, the form of a woman becomes a yucca plant, ecstatically expelling particles of revery in their fusion. In Nika Kaiser's work, notions of human's inherent connection to the natural world are highlighted through surreal and uncanny narratives. This stop motion from 2010 is one in a series of video works describing the the anthropomorphic qualities of plant life in the American Southwest.
Artist Bio:
Nika Kaiser is a photographer, video and installation artist. Born in the desert of Tucson, Arizona,
this native landscape informs her work as she combines ideas of psychological transformation,
regional histories, folklore and environmental conservation.
Kaiser received her MFA from University of Oregon in 2013. Her work has been exhibited
internationally, including shows at Bruce High Quality Foundation, Brooklyn, NY; Portland
Museum of Modern Art, Portland, OR; Disjecta Gallery, Portland OR; Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild,
NY; University of Dubai, UAE; Dinnerware Contemporary Arts, Tucson AZ; WNDX Festival of the
Moving Image, Winnipeg, MB; Antimatter [Media Art], Victoria, BC; University of Rostock, GE.
She has been the recipient of numerous awards, most recently the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship.
She is an alumni member of the collective Ditch Projects in Springfield, OR and current member of the
female video collective Ungrund. Her photographs and videos have been featured in Vice Magazine
and on National Public Radio.
Neither God Nor Santa Maria (2015)
Samuel M. Delgado and Helena Girón
11 min 45 sec, 16mm transferred to video
Since airplanes did not exist, people moved around using prayers, they went from one land to another and returned early, before dawn.
In old audio recordings, the voices of pastors speak of the mythical existence of witches and their travels. In the daily life of a woman the magic of her tales begin to materialize as night falls. Night is the time when travel is possible.
Artist Bios:
Samuel M. Delgado
b. Tenerife. 1987.
His work is largely found between of experimental and non-fiction. His films had been selected in international film festivals as Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Mar del Plata, FIC Valdivia, Curtas Vila do Conde, Ann Arbor or Media City Film Festival, where was awarded. This work also recived awards in Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux of Paris, Alcances and Curtocircuito International Film Festival. His works have been exhibited at museums as Lincoln Center in New York (as part of the NYFF), Art Gallery Ontario (as part of the TIFF) or CCCB (Barcelona).
He co-directed the film Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers! Also wrote the screenplay for the feature film Slimane directed by Jose A. Alayón (EL Viaje Films. 2013), directed the short film Malpaís (Trova Film, El Viaje Films 2013). These productions were represented at international film festivals where they have won various awards and accolades. As editor, he worked in the short film Tout le monde aime le bord de la mer by Keina Espiñeira (El Viaje Films. 2016), wich had it wolrd premiere at International Film Festival Rotterdam and was nominated to the European Film Awards.
He is visiting professor at San Antonio de los Baños’s EICTV (Cuba), ECAM, Instituto del Cine de Madrid and at IFIC.
He has a Media degree, a scriptwritting Master and studied workshops at EICTV of production and scrpitwritting.
Helena Girón
b. Santiago de Compostela. 1988.
Her current work is focused between documentary and experimental cinema using physical materials and photochemical processes. Her films had been selected in international film festivals as Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Mar del Plata, FIC Valdivia, Curtas Vila do Conde, Ann Arbor or Media City Film Festival, where was awarded and also recived awards in Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux of Paris, Alcances and Curtocircuito International Film Festival. His films have been exhibited at museums as Lincoln Center in New York (as part of the NYFF) or Art Gallery Ontario (as part of the TIFF) or CCCB (Barcelona).
She is visiting professor at ECAM and IFIC.
After get the Media degree, she studied a Master in Scriptwritting at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, a Master in Editing in the ESCAC and the Anthropology degree.
KORONA (2013)
Lena Ditte Nissen
10 min 20 sec, 16 mm transferred to video
KORONA poetically describes the subjective physical and psychological experience of a recurring subversion of the self-experience of a young woman. The whispered narration from the perspective of the speaker, and the reduced use of minimal black and white images leads the viewer further and further into the inner of a mythical state of being, that is neither an end nor a solution.
"An elegant and understated study of the development of both the human soul and the medium of film." (CPH:DOX, New Danish Artists)
Artist Bio:
The danish-german artist and filmmaker Lena Ditte Nissen (1987) lives and works in
Copenhagen and Berlin. She studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, Kunstakademie
Düsseldorf and Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Her works have been shown internationally at
Festival de nouveau cinéma Montreal, Edinburgh International Film Festival, CPH:DOX, Belo
Horizonte International Short Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, among other Festivals and
exibition spaces such as Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, KAI10 Arthena Foundation Düsseldorf and the
Bangkok Arts and Culture Center.
Poem and Stone (2015)
Maryam Tafakory
10 min 37 sec, video
One experiences and records the present through bodily sensations that hold memories. The desire to remember, embeds the past involuntarily within the present.
Poem and stone interweaves performance, documentary and poetry, drawing on notions of belonging, absence and the impossibility of a return. Strolling the streets of Tehran, unfolding recollections, inscribed as it were, through a language primarily material.
Bringing the distant, the outside and the unreachable inside a studio space, the residual, the soil, dust and stains aren’t mere reconstruction of the past but an attempt to return to ritualise fragments of the forgotten and absent referencing Marcel Proust’s notion of ‘Involuntary Memory’ coined in his book ‘In search of lost time’.
--
“It appears we are returning to something but we are in fact creating something through that very return to it”. Slavoj Zizek
Artist Bio:
Maryam Tafakory (b. Iran) is an artist filmmaker living and working in London. Her work draws on the notion of ‘personal as political’ in a fractured narrative that involves a subtle negotiation between factual and fiction, exploring allegorical forms of visual narrative, using abstracted, symbolic and textual motifs and their on-screen representation.
Part performance, her work draws on womanhood and rites of passage, interweaving poetry, (self)-censorship and religion, combining a formal minimalist syntax and figurative mode of representation.
Her work is screened and exhibited internationally including, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Zurich Film Festiva, Internationales KurzFilmFestival Hamburg, ICA London, British Film Institute, Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, Barbican Centre London, Ciné Lumière Institut Français, London Short Film Festival, ritish Animation Awards, Bloomberg New Contemporarie and BBC Three.
Markings 1 - 3 (2011)
Eva Kolcze
6 min 54 sec, 16mm transferred to video
A tactile journey in three parts. Markings 1-3 is an attempt to connect with nature through the surface of celluloid, using such techniques as tinting, toning, painting and scratching.
This film was shot and hand processed at the Independent Imaging Retreat (The Film Farm) in Mount Forest Ontario.
Artist Bio:
Eva Kolcze is a Toronto-based artist and filmmaker whose work explores themes of landscape, architecture and the body. Her work has screened at venues and festivals including the National Gallery of Canada, Anthology Film Archives, Cinematheque Quebecoise, Birch Contemporary, International Rotterdam Film Festival, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and the Images Festival.
Study for Unsettling (2016)
Lydia Moyer
2 min 16 sec, video
Sourced from images on cabinporn.com, a popular tumblr that catalogs pictures of tiny cabins in sublime landscapes, Study for Unsettling is a frame-by-frame animation that erases the focal point of the built structures to recast the viewers' attention on the natural environments in which the structures sit. The marks left are remnants of the disruptive energy of settlers.
Artist Bio:
Lydia Moyer is a visual artist and media maker who lives and works in central Virginia. She directs the new media program in the art department at the University of Virginia.
Waving (2014)
Shaina Lund
3 min 20 sec, video
Courtesy of the artist and Stuart & Co. Gallery
Waving, To Wave (v)
The act of becoming wave-like. To take on the characteristics of a wave.
In the deep winter of the upper midwest, I found myself climbing snow covered dunes on the frozen Lake Michigan shoreline. A nearby swing set afforded a moment to channel the suspended wave energy of that great water mass then in seeming hibernation.
Artist Bio:
Shaina Lund grew up in western New York, a product of the shifting Lake Ontario skies and the glacier-formed rock and clay of Fairport. Her interest in art was sparked by tracing images of dogs from a children’s how-to-draw book. This act of tracing, of layering paper, graphite, paper, clay, paper, light has remained integral to the way she sees the world and translates it through her art practice.
After graduating high school, Lund moved to Minnesota to attain a degree in Studio Art from Northwestern College in 2011. Transplanting slightly from the Minneapolis area, she moved to Chicago and earned her MFA in Ceramics at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014. Her academic and artistic work has received numerous distinctions through nominations, awards, and scholarships.
Shaina currently lives and works in Chicago, developing her practice through writing, ceramics, photography, video installation, drawing, and performative work.
Sounds of the Sea, Crickets and Translucent Yellow (2016)
Ananda Serné
5 min 44 sec, HD video
Sounds of the Sea, Crickets and Translucent Yellow combines two identical statues: one situated in a park close to Nagoya in Japan, the other next to the sea in a small town in the Netherlands. The work focuses not on the historical associations that statues often entail, but rather the way the statues function as representatives of the environment they are placed in—the park and the seashore. The point of departure for this work was the ability to be in two places at once through the senses.
Artist Bio:
Ananda Serné (NL, 1988) grew up on a boat on some of the canals and rivers of Europe. She holds an MA in Fine Arts from the Iceland Academy of the Arts in Reykjavík and lives between Norway and the Netherlands where she works primarily with photography, moving image and text.