January 26th, 2015
8:00pm
@ grayDUCK Gallery
2213 East Cesar Chavez Street, Austin, TX 78702 (map)
Free ($5-$10 Suggested Donation)
Filmmaker + Curator Warren Cockerham in Person!
The New England Home Movie Tour features handmade and homemade poetic film works from the northeast that celebrate the tactility and intimacy of celluloid-based moving images. As the commercial film industry forces us to embrace digital moving images and the planned obsolescence of the means to produce and distribute those products, this film tour aims to share films that embrace the contemporary DIY strategies, politics, and aesthetics of an enduring, artisanal, and personal approach to filmmaking. This traveling program carries with it more than 30 16mm works and 120 35mm slides that will ensure a uniquely arranged program at each stop along its way. With works by Luther Price, Jodie Mack, Robert Todd, Jonathan Schwartz, Jo Dery, Warren Cockerham, and Colin Brant.
grayDUCK was founded in 2010 in South Austin, and relocated to East Austin in 2014. In our art-energized neighborhood, we strive to exhibit the work of exceptional artists while creating a welcoming place for everyone: viewers, artists and neighbors. Monthly shows highlight artist’s work from a broad range of experience, both locally and nationally. Our refurbished 100-year old house is a hybrid of new and old, clean lines and comfortable wood. The inviting space with a modern sensibility is a beautiful place for artwork, poetry readings, film, music and performance, a place where art is integral to everyday life.
Program
Animals Moving to the Sound of Drums by Jonathan Schwartz
8 min / 16mm / sound / 2013
That fall it was not intentional to have a Galway Kinnell book on the table near where the caterpillar in the doorway, feeding on our offerings, became the butterfly, feeding on honey water, staying in our house until we let it go. Or it was not known about the deer in Putney or that the baby birds in the raspberry bushes would cry to us in summer. A beloved, old friend once visited Vermont to do some work for Galway Kinnell and she described a stone table in the field where they ate meals in the afternoon – it sounded like a song and so I looked at the book and from Little Sleep’s-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight here is that line: “The still undanced cadence of vanishing”.
Roadside Attractions by Robert Todd,
9 min / 16mm / sound / 2013
Sights of sites along the road. Circling a City Block in Boston.
The Natural History of Harris Ave by Jo Dery
3 min / 16mm / sound / 2004
Xerox transfer and silkscreen on clear leader. Images of different weeds growing along Harris Avenue in Providence, RI
Inkblot #15: Helens Dreaming by Luther Price
10 min / 16mm / sound / 2008
Persian Pickles by Jodie Mack
3 min / 16mm / sound / 2012
A swimming study of paisley patterns traces this decorative motif from its origins in Persian weavings to appearances Irish quilting and American Counterculture. Extending on the stroboscopic tradition of anti-animation, this short material study fixates upon discarded materials to examine the decorative and its relationship to the cycles of industry and evolving modes of production.
Scream Tone by Jo Dery
3 min / 16mm / sound / 2004
This is a direct animation made by applying Letraset half-tone films onto 16mm film. The sound is made by the image as read on the optical track. There is both a positive and negative version of the film; the sound reads differently in each version.
3 Generations: Training by Warren Cockerham
10 min / 16mm / sound / 2014
A collage film. Contents: a 70s educational film for parents, silk screen copies, macro footage of court and police records, 2 photographs, elastration footage and fingerprints.
Selections from Light Fractures, Meat, and Sorry by Luther Price
35mm handmade slides / 2008-2012
Undergrowth by Robert Todd
11 min / 16mm / sound / 2011
A hunter dreams through its prey’s eyes.
Tracking Shots: minus moose by Colin Brant
5 min / 16mm / sound / 2014
Winter is cold, the Taiga is vast, and moving through it somewhere is a cloistered beast. This film is the first of several animated tracking shot films that was shot with a Bolex on black and white reversal film and hand processed in buckets.
If the War Continues by Jonathan Schwartz
5 min / 16mm / sound / 2012
for ascending:
“and before I could be noticed again and taken to task, I spoke to the tiny blessed star within me, shut off my heartbeat, made my body disappear into the shadow of a bush, and continued my previous voyage without thinking about returning home ever again.” -H.Hesse
Inkblot #22 by Luther Price
5 min / 16mm / sound/ 2008
Future is Bright by Jodie Mack,
3 min / 16mm / sound / 2011
‘Tis a rhyme for your lips
And a song for your heart
To sing it whenever
The world falls apart
Bios
Colin Brant (Bennington, VT):
Colin Brant is a moving-image maker and technician who, for the last 2 years, has been working primarily with hand-processed 16mm film. His growing body of short 16mm works explore visual rhymes that grow out of repetitive camera performances, and deal with landscape, movement, and exploration. His choice to work with image sequences in a handmade/homemade/tactile way are a means to these ends. He is currently the Film/Video/Animation technician at Bennington College in Vermont.
Warren Cockerham (Bennington, VT):
Warren Cockerham is a film and video maker who received his MFA in Film, Video, and New Media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010 and earned a BA in English from the University of Florida’s Film and Media Studies program in 2006. From 2008-2012, his interests in media democracy and advocacy led to the founding of FilmLAB@1512: a film and video art-making program for teenagers in Chicago’s North Lawndale Community. He’s worked as a programmer and curator for The Florida Experimental Film Festival, RISK Cinema at the Harn Museum of Art, The Chicago Underground Film Festival, and The Eye and Ear Clinic At SAIC. His film and video work is motivated by a curiosity about complex power structures in familial/intimate relationships and how these analogue power structures are presented and observed through the mediation of public and private archival material. His short films and videos have screened at a variety of moving-image venues domestically and abroad. He is currently Visual Arts Faculty at Bennington College where he runs a bi-weekly invitational screening and lecture series.
Jo Dery (Brattleboro, VT):
Jo Dery is an artist who experiments with visual storytelling. She makes short films, little books, prints, and installation projects.
Her short films have screened at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation. In 2012, she recieved the Helen Hill Award, which supports innovative indepenedent filmmakers. She has been awarded grants from the LEF Foundation, The Free History Project, and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. Her drawings and prints have been exhibited in Providence, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Berlin. Her little books can be found in independent stores like Ada Books (Providence), Quimby’s (Chicago), and Little Otsu (Portland).
She earned a BFA in Film/Animation/Video from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College. She has completed residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, as well as participated in an animation workshop at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, Poland.
After living in Providence for a decade, she relocated to Chicago to teach in DePaul University’s Animation program for three years. She is currently based in Brattleboro, Vermont, and is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Keene State College in southern New Hampshire.
Jodie Mack (Lebanon, NH):
Jodie Mack is an experimental animator who received her MFA in film, video, and new media from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007 and currently teaches animation at Dartmouth College. Combining the formal techniques and structures of abstract/absolute animation with those of cinematic genres, her handmade films use collage to explore the relationship between graphic cinema and storytelling, the tension between form and meaning. Musical documentary or stroboscopic archive: her films study domestic and recycled materials to illuminate the elements shared between fine-art abstraction and mass-produced graphic design. Questioning the role of decoration in daily life, the works unleash the kinetic energy of overlooked and wasted objects.
Mack’s 16mm films have screened at a variety of venues including the Images Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, and Views From the Avant Garde at the New York Film Festival. She has presented solo programs of her work at venues such as the Anthology Film Archives, Los Angeles Filmforum, REDCAT, and the BFI London Film Festival. She has also worked as a curator and administrator with Dartmouth’s EYEWASH: Experimental Films and Videos, Florida Experimental Film and Video Festival, Portland Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, Eye and Ear Clinic, Chicago Underground Film Festival, and The Nightingale. She was a featured artist at the 2011 Flaherty Seminar, and she’s the 2013 recipient of the Marion McMahan Award at the Images Festival.
Luther Price (Revere, MA):
Known since the 1980s for his Super-8 films and performances, Luther Price has, in recent years, turned to 16mm film, creating new works from discarded prints of old documentaries, snippets of Hollywood features, and other examples of cinematic detritus. He re-edits the footage by hand, effaces the image through scraping, buries the films to rot and gather mold, and adds chaotic visual patterns using colored inks and permanent markers. For soundtracks, he frequently uses only the brutal electromechanical noise generated by sprocket holes running through the projector’s audio system. Each reel he produces is thereby a unique object, often altered to such an extent that it struggles through the projector, as if playing out the end of film itself; his is a cinema that ecstatically embraces its death drive, so as to achieve maximum potency.
Using some of the same techniques as for his films, the artist also creates handmade slides, which were first exhibited at the 2012 Whitney Biennial. Price makes these slides to stand as general representations of his film pieces; when asked to contribute an image of his work for publication, he prefers to submit a slide, rather than reproduce one frame of a filmstrip, because each slide exists as a discrete, independent work. These isolated objects, however, demonstrate just as much strength as the films they are intended to epitomize.
Price typically begins with found footage, which he cuts up and reassembles, combines, and otherwise alters. He often presses other things between the two glass plates of the slides, projecting ants, dirt, and adhesive materials onto the gallery wall. Like his films, these slides are studies of a dying technology, pushing and exploring the qualities of light projected through and onto a variety of transparent, semitransparent, and opaque materials.
Jonathan Schwartz (Brattleboro, VT):
Jonathan Schwartz makes short films that circulate primarily in an experimental and non-fiction film context. Films are generally constructed from fragmented collections and findings, from both exterior and interior spaces. His films have exhibited in many festivals including New York Film Festival “Views from the Avant-Garde” and “Projections”, TIFF “Wavelengths”, Rotterdam, Ann Arbor, Images, Media City, Recontres Internationales, Exis, TIE, and others. Recent solo screenings include UnionDocs, Cinema Project, and San Francisco Cinematheque. In 2010, he was included in The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Avant-Garde Poll in Film Comment as one of 25 Filmmakers for the 21st century. He holds an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art, lives in Brattleboro, Vermont and is an associate professor at Keene State College.
Robert Todd (Boston, MA):
A lyrical filmmaker as well as a sound and visual artist, Robert Todd continually produces short works that resist categorization. In the past twenty years he has produced a large body of short-to-medium format films that have been exhibited internationally at a wide variety of venues and festivals including the Media City Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Le Rencontres Internationale, Black Maria Film Festival, Nouveau Cinema in Montreal, Cinematheque Ontario, the Harvard Film Archive, Pacific Film Archive, the Paris Biennial, Slamdance Film Festival, and others. His films have won numerous festival prizes, grants, and artist’s awards. He teaches film production at Emerson College in Boston.