"A Place of Memory: Video Art and Chicago"
DPAM DEPAUL ART MUSEUM
http://museums.depaul.edu/news/events/
Location: 935 W Fullerton
Time: February 23, Thursday, 6pm-7:30pm
A video screening program about the memory of sites and architectures, evoking personal longing or loss through the lenses of video devices and aesthetic contemplation. Content of the videos ranges from a traveler’s dialogue with the self to a journey through a ghetto in Italy; a pedestrian’s experience of a sidewalk in Chicago to the fragmentation of memory signified by architecture icons; a river in China accompanied by the singing of Propaganda songs to the demolished and lost buildings of Louise Sullivan.
Curated by Chi Jang Yin, Associate Professor, Department of Art, Media and Design at DePaul, in conjunction with "Re: Chicago". Artists will be available on site for a Q&A after the screening.
Magic for Beginners, Jesse McLean (2010, DV video, 21 min.)
Magic for Beginners examines the mythologies found in fan culture, from longing to obsession to psychic connections. The need for such connections (whether real or imaginary) as well as the need for an emotional release that only fantasy can deliver is explored.
"Jesse McLean’s 20-minute video Magic for Beginners is an intermittently gripping, psychedelic montage revolving around childhood obsessions with Leonardo DiCaprio and the video game Tron."
--Ken Johnson, "Magic for Beginners", New York Times, August 11th, 2011
Bio: Jesse McLean grew up in Pennsylvania, studied art at Oberlin College and received her MFA in Moving Image from University of Illinois at Chicago. She has shown her work most recently at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, threewalls, Migrating Forms at Anthology Film Archives, Art Chicago, Portland Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, Director's Lounge in Berlin, FLEX, Monkeytown, Sullivan Galleries, Chicago Underground Film Festival, LUMP gallery/projects and Space 1026. She lives and works in Chicago, IL.
Shrimp Chicken Fish, Deborah Stratman (2010, DV video, 5 min.)
An homage to Chicago's East 95th Street Bridge, Calumet Fisheries and to a couple of the city's infamous brothers. The take-out shack, originally glimpsed in the background of a scene from The Blues Brothers, still operates. It has become a real-world portal to a cinematic past. Propped along the edge of the 95th street drawbridge, the building is framed by the towering infrastructures of the Chicago Skyway and Calumet Harbor.
Bio: Deborah Stratman works in a territory between experimental and documentary genres. In her films and frequent work in other media, including drawing, sculpture, sound, photography and small press, she explores the history, uses, mythologies and control of highly varied landscapes, from Muslim Xinjiang China to suburban southern California. Her recent work addresses American constructs of Freedom, the junction between technology and faith and contemporary locations of the supernatural. She continues to solicit public responses about FEAR (to participate, call toll-free 1-800-585-1078). Stratman teaches in the School of Art & Design at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
Dark River, Chi Jang Yin (2010, DV video, 6 min.)
It is a still night and two elderly women, fellow artists and friends, walk on a path side by side along a river that runs through a Chinese village. It has been 50 years and they have not forgotten the propaganda songs that they learned at the educational camps during the Cultural Revolution. Rather than acknowledging them as nationalistic creations, the two friends have turned the songs into a longing for their youth.
Bio: Chinese-born media artist Chi Jang Yin is best known for her reflective, autobiographical work, which comments upon the state of Chinese culture, past and present. Her video work combines documentary, experimental and narrative disciplines and she often imbues her work with elements from her background in photography and performance art. Yin’s award-winning videos are internationally recognized and are frequently featured in film exhibitions, galleries, museums and film festivals, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Kassel Dokumentarfilm-und-Videofest (Germany), The Los Angeles Film Festival, and The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, IDFA (The Netherlands).
Lost Buildings, 2004 Chicago Public Radio, Ira Glass, Chris Ware and Tim Samuelson. (2004, video, 22 min.)
The story of a boy named Tim Samuelson, who became obsessed with old buildings, especially the buildings of Louis Sullivan in Chicago, during the 1960's and 70's when they were being torn down.
Originally presented as an on-stage radio & picture collaboration between Ira Glass and graphic novelist Chris Ware, Lost Buildings recounts Chicago historian Tim Samuelson’s childhood obsession with Chicago’s architectural treasures, including Louis Sullivan’s buildings, and his friendship with architectural photographer, Richard Nickel. Permission courtesy of WBEZ and This American Life, with thanks to Chris Ware and Seth Lind. Produced by Ira Glass; illustrated by Chris Ware.
Bio: Ira Glass is an American public radio host and producer of the radio and television show "This American Life."
Bio: Chris Ware is an American comic book artist and cartoonist, widely known for his "Acme Novelty Library" series and the graphic novel "Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth."
The Mendi, Steve Reinke (2006, DV video, 9 min.)
Over found footage from The Mendi--an ethnographic documentary made for the CBC's Man Alive television show in the 1970s--the narrator tells of his summer as a teenage assistant to the filmmakers. In the tradition of Buñuel's Land Without Bread.
"The latest missive from Canadian vid genius Reinke finds him recovering an errant CBC documentary and finding a new way to look at it by working on the soundtrack. He sees with his ears, and with his mouth. He applies his mouth to this footage, he gives it mouth to mouth, so that it can be seen again. This movie is very much in the tradition of Trinh T. Min-Ha, especially her early, interventionist, meta-anthropological work like Re:assemblage. His fearlessness makes me wonder: how could he? How does he dare?" --Mike Hoolboom, International Film Festival Rotterdam, 2006
Bio: Steve Reinke is an artist and writer best known for his work in video. His work is in many collections including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Centre Pompidou (Paris) and the National Gallery (Ottawa), and has screened at many festivals including Sundance, Rotterdam, Oberhausen and the New York Video Festival. Steve Reinke is an Associate Professor of Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University.
Buildings and Gesture, Susy Gile (2010, HD, 2 min.)
In Buildings and Gestures, multiple participants describe from memory iconic buildings they have visited. Each participant describes a different building from locations all over the world, but the footage is cut to suggest a narrative of a single building. The cuts include only the gestures and their corresponding verbiage. The subjects are shot in a white room, devoid of detail and visual cues, to emphasize the visual and spatial aspects of speech. The video is presented inside a larger architectural structure made of cardboard. The structure is a conglomeration of architectural types, like the memories described in the video.
Bio: Susan Giles is an artist working in sculpture and video. She teaches in the Department of Art, Media and Design at DePaul University in Chicago. She has a MA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a MFA from Northwestern University. Giles’ work has shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Renaissance Society in Chicago, Santa Monica Museum of Art in California, and Kunsthalle Goeppingen in Germany, among others. She has received several grants, including a 2009 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Award for Visual Arts, a 2005 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and a 1998 Fulbright Grant to Indonesia to conduct research on the intersection of tourism and culture in Bali.
Gheto, Steve Harp (1997/2006, DV/Hi8 video, 10 min.)
A traveler’s internal monologue, a journey through a ghetto in Italy, and some thoughts on tourism, borders, history, assimilation and foreignness.
Bio: Steve Harp is an Associate Professor of Media Arts at DePaul University in Chicago.