This is Yates (2016)
Josh Yates, 12 min, video
 

This is Yates is a reflexive analog-elegy that hates itself. Presented through a collage of serene and violent home movies, it invites the viewer to question not only the ways in which we shape identity via fragmented media, but also the processes through which we construct memory and deal with personal trauma. The film occupies a space between nonfictional portraiture and ethnographic dreamscape, offering a nuanced portrait of southern youth culture as well as a visceral rumination on bodies both decaying and enduring.

This is Yates was edited over the course of three years and completed during an artist residency with Nickelodeon Theatre in Columbia, SC.

Credits:
Executive Producers: Chris Black, Seth Gadsden, Andy Smith
Creative Consultants: Steve Daniels, William S. Davis, Laura Iancu, Jeff Jackson, Timothy David Orme, Metrah Pashaee, Michael Salerno
Music: Cassis Orange "O, So What"
Thank You: Caroline Taylor, the Anderson family, Atlanta Film Festival, Contraband Cinema, the Eanes family, Georg Koszulinski, Indie Grits, Jason Livingston, Jeff Simpson, Jesse Kreitzer, Jesse McLean, Kelly Gallagher, the Krobath family, Mike Gibisser, Mike Peterson, Nicholas Rys, Sasha Waters Freyer, Steve Choe, UIowa FVP Program, UNEXPOSED Microcinema, Elizabeth Slagsvol
Special Thank You: Charles Woodard

Artist Bio:
Josh Yates is a media artist/educator based in the Carolinas. His film/video work and photography have been shared internationally via outlets such as: Anthology Film Archives, Los Angeles Filmforum, Photographer's Forum Magazine, VICE, Vimeo (Staff Pick), Art Papers, Indie Memphis, Cucalorus, Atlanta Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, and Indie Grits. Yates currently teaches a variety of video production and film studies course at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

101 (2016)
Jason Robinson, 7 min, video
 

101 traces the treacherous path of a single driver through the mud, smoke, and destruction of the Madison County Fair Demolition Derby.

Artist Bio:
Jason Robinson makes films, videos, sounds, prints, performances and animated gifs that investigate how places remember.  His worked has screened at festivals and galleries both nationally and internationally including The Virginia Film Festival (Charlottesville, VA), Luxus (Corning, NY), The Asheville Art Museum (NC), and the Transmission Art Festival (Athens, Greece). He is also the creator of Screensavers, an annual video performance series held at the Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative in Charlottesville, VA.
Robinson completed his MFA in Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University and earned a BA in Film and Video from the Pennsylvania State University. He is an assistant professor of Digital Art at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA.

Black River (2016)
Eeva Siivonen, 14 min, video

Black River is a visual essay about perpetual metamorphosis.  Through the rhetorical and poetic dialogue between language, image and sound, it gives transient shapes to imagined beings and their voices that repeatedly emerge from -- and disappear into -- their environments.

Artist Bio:
Eeva Siivonen is a Finnish filmmaker originally from Helsinki, Finland. She holds a BFA and an MFA in documentary film directing from Aalto University, School of Art and Design. She also holds an MFA in video art from Syracuse University where she studied as a Fulbright scholar. Her award winning moving image work has screened internationally at numerous film festivals, video art events and exhibitions across Europe and in the US.

It is Only Necessary to Make the Thing Difficult to Attain (2015)
Colleen Plumb, 4 min, video

Throughout this video, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain is read as a voice-over by Plumb's young daughter, who is learning to read. The piece includes a variety of scenes: clowns on parade, a close-up of Niagara Falls, icy Lake Michigan, snow plows— alternating scenes of effort and relaxation that point to the teetering balance betweenease andhardships in daily life . Loose reference is made to themes taken up in historical paintings: the scraping of the floor behind a plastic sheet references Gustave Caillebotte's The Floor Planers, (urban work) in contrast to the work of peasants, seen in the grass waving in the wind, and the circus tent flapping with the man sitting guard. Motherhood— ripe with contrasts, the joy and serious duty of it—undergirds the piece. The title of the video is a quote from the book—a truism that Tom discovered about work and desire.

Artist Bio:
Colleen Plumb works in a variety of mediums that include photography, video, public installation, and bookmaking. Her work is held in several permanent collections and has been widely exhibited, including the Portland Art Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Blue Sky Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts, The Screening Room and Dina Mitrani Gallery in Miami, and Jen Bekman Gallery in New York. Her first photography monograph, Animals Are Outside Today (Radius Books, 2011) was a Photo District News notable book. Her work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Blow Photo Magazine , New York Times LENS, Time Lightbox, Oxford American, and Artillery Magazine. Plumb teaches in the Photography Department at Columbia College Chicago. She lives in Chicago with her husband and their two daughters.