Calendar

CalArts, Butler Building #4

CRITICAL STUDIES: Salon and reading to welcome the incoming MFA1 students.

CalArts, Bijou Theater

FILM/VIDEO: Betzy Bromberg, Program Director and Faculty Member, Program in Film and Video, will show and discuss Divinity Gratis (1996, 60 min, 16mm, color/sound) and other work.

An opus to the evolution of civilization.

"Divinity Gratis... explores time and space, starting at the beginning of the world, with molten rock and water in sequences that are exquisite in their sensuousness. Bromberg's ability to meld ideas and images is perhaps best exemplified in this work, which is truly breathtaking in its conceptual sweep. One line seems to unify the film - a voice repeats on the soundtrack, "A girl, blind from birth, saw the flash." The flash references an atomic blast, and thus links the film's beginning section, which is all about origins, and the film's suggestion of apocalypse, death and the infinite sweep of time."
- Holly Willis, LA Weekly

"An hour long and seven years in the making, Divinity Gratis locates personal experience and subjective vision in a history of the human species, culminating the technological revolutions that dominate the last years of the millennium. References to the atomic bomb and the moon landing, often incongruous or ironic, form a grid on which movement up from primeval elements through the appearance of animals and buildings to the modern city and the worlds of contemporary science and religion, culminating in a more lyrical section in which a young woman - Bromberg herself - is introduced into a condensed recapitulation of the whole film. Unconstrainedly eclectic and ranging freely among biological close-ups, museum dioramas, Gothic cathedrals, workers in the Los Angeles sex industries, and the Trinity Site on the White Sands Missile Range, where the first atomic bomb was tested, the imagery is almost all made over into the filmmaker's visual idiolect, where color, texture, and camera movement provide for a sensual improvisatory montage..."
- David James (2005), From The Most Typical Avant-Garde - History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles

An active filmmaker since 1976, Betzy Bromberg has presented work at the Museum of Modern Art, Harvard Film Archives, Anthology Film Archives, London’s National Film Theatre, and the Centre Pompidou, as well as numerous international film festivals.

Previous to becoming the Director of the Program in Film and Video at CalArts, Betzy Bromberg worked in the Hollywood special effects industry for many years as a supervisor and camerawoman for the production of optical effects in major motion pictures.

The Annex

ART: The Paul Brach Visiting Artist Lecture Series kicks off with a "cook-on" with artists Jen Smith & David Thorne.  Please join us for an evening of food and conversation, with a warm welcome to incoming students and in celebration of the new year.  

Known for her music, zines, and involvement in the DIY culture, riot grrrl Jen Smith now runs her own catering business, Full Moon Pickles. She says, "I am an artist and a cook. I make pickles. These practices inform each other. I aim to negotiate a synthesis between my formal aesthetics, my social practice project of pickling, my day job as a caterer."

• Interview with Jen: http://www.chef-speak.com/Jen-Smith-of-Full-Moon-Pickles
• Jen's food blog: http://fullmoonpickles.blogspot.com/

David Thorne has collaborated with Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt, and Katya Sander on the project 9 Scripts from a Nation at War for documenta 12. He currently produces videos, photographs, and installations with artist Julia Meltzer. Their past projects have centered on secrecy, history, and memory. Current works focus on the ways in which visions of the future are imagined, claimed, and realized or relinquished, specifically in relation to faith and global politics.

David is also known to be a fabulous cook, and runs the food space 'elysian' that hosts weekly "Night In" dinners. Check out the site: http://www.elysianla.com/

• David’s work: http://www.meltzerthorne.com/
• Read about cooking+art+life in ArtForum's 500 Words:http://artforum.com/words/id=30585 

Opening Reception
Saturday, September 15 | 6–9pm

Gallery Hours
Tuesday-Sunday | 12pm–6pm or Intermission

REDCAT: Rhode Island-based artist Tony Cokes’ Retro (Pop, Terror, Critique) is an ambitious new multichannel video installation that surveys the past 15 years of his work. Since the mid-1980s, Cokes has employed the medium of video to borrow and sample materials from high and low culture and reveal how race, gender and class are perceived through “representational regimes of image and sound.”  Read more

CalArts, Roy O. Disney Music Hall

MUSIC: The Composition program presents visiting artist Otomo Yoshihide, as part of the Experimental Sound Practices class.

CalArts, Roy O. Disney Music Hall

MUSIC: The Concert Theater program presents visiting artist Akio Suzuki, as part of the Concert Theater class.

F200

ART: "Long's sculptures have explored the abstract autonomous art object as a psychological investigation into the nature self and others and have been made from diverse media such as coffee grounds, rubber and hair from Abraham Lincoln. He has collaborated with pop musicians such as Stereolab, Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo and with the renown choreographer Merce Cunningham. Since his relocation from NYC to LA Long's work has been inspired by the Los Angeles River which runs adjacent to his studio. Each year, after the furious flood season, a verdant and abundant growth of grasses, thickets, and trees emerges from the discarded office furniture, bedsprings, and shopping carts that get washed into the concrete channel providing a providing a dwelling for mallards, osprey, crayfish and heron. Captivated by the river and inspired by its unbiased intermingling of these elements, Long creates photographs, video and sculpture in and about the river and the myriad of imagery and meanings it offers. In 2005 he had a solo museum show at Site Sante Fe, NM where he exhibited these new works." (from http://art.ucr.edu/people/faculty/Long/) 

• Check out his work: http://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/artist.php?art_name=Charles Long
• Charles Long - Artforum 500 Words: http://artforum.com/words/id=30942

CalArts, Butler Building 4

CRITICAL STUDIES: Janice Lee is a writer, artist, editor, designer, curator, and scholar interested in the relationships between metaphors of consciousness and experimental narrative. Her work can be found in antennae, sidebrow, Action Yes, Joyland, Luvina, Everday Genius, elimae, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of two highly acclaimed novels: KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Publishing, 2012), a multidisciplinary exploration of cyborgs, brains, and the stakes of consciousness; and Daughter (Jaded Ibis, May 2011). She also has several chapbooks: Red Trees, The Chronovisor Project (a collaboration with Laura Vena), Fried Chicken Dinner (Parrot/Insert Press, August 2012), and The Other Worlds (Eohippus Labs, June 2012). She currently lives in Los Angeles where she is Co-Editor of the online journal [out of nothing], Co-Founder of the interdisciplinary arts organization Strophe, Reviews Editor at HTMLGIANT, and Founder/CEO of POTG Design. Most recently, she was selected by John D’Agata as Black Warrior Review‘s Nonfiction Grand Prize Winner and she currently teaches at CalArts.  When asked about whether her work contains a message for readers, Janice replied, "What really interests me is what happens when someone reads a text, and not just any text, but one that really affects them, changes them somehow. I’m interested in these changes, both conceptually speaking, but also physically, how these changes get manifested neurologically. I’m interested in introspection and the construction of a phenomenological self-model during reading, and in narrativization versus narrative."

CalArts, The Wild Beast

MUSIC: Guest artist and internationally renowned vocalist Lucy Shelton performs a concert of song accompanied by Mark Menzies.

F200

ART: Can Design End a War?

Carol A. Wells is an art historian, curator, and founding director of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG), an educational and research archive with more than 80,000 domestic and international social movement posters from the 19th century to the present. Wells has produced more than 75 poster exhibitions which have travelled to over 300 venues throughout the U.S. and internationally. Her articles on political graphics have appeared in numerous publications and catalogues, including Peace Press Graphics 1967-1967: Art in the Pursuit of Social Change, which Wells co-edited as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Initiative. In 2010, Wells received the first Wally Marks Pursuit of Change Award from FACTS (Families to Amend California’s Three Strikes), and in 2011, she received the Avery Clayton Spirit Award from L.A. as Subject.

REDCAT: The sublime 16mm films of Los Angeles experimentalist Timoleon Wilkins trace their roots to the romantic and diaristic traditions of the American avant-garde. Making a virtue of working on the edge of celluloid history, he is among a handful of cinematographers still using reversal film.  Read more

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CalArts, Bijou Theater

FILM/VIDEO: Lee Anne Schmitt, faculty member, Film Directing Program, will show and discuss California Company Town.

"Schmitt’s work is a direct illustration of the connection between the personal and the political, and illuminates the strains created by the many inequities found within America’s political and economic systems." The Viennale

CALIFORNIA COMPANY TOWN (76 min., color, 16mm, 2008)
“The twenty-odd towns that Schmitt profiles appear as they really are—as vacant buildings, abandoned graveyards, warning signs, and tourist spectacles; as spaces where marginal inhabitants move under the muted blue-gray of polluted skies… Accompanied by Schmitt’s earnest narration, these images quickly become an essay on privatized land ownership, the failure of cooperative labor, the effects of industrial fallout on the environment, and, underlying it all, the American dream. Recounting facts and using archival film and audio, the artist cautiously fleshes out short, contained narratives to hang on the bones of each town.” —Catherine Taft, Art Forum

History is always marked upon the land, a process made remarkable in California, a state whose very geography has been re-charted to serve specific uses. While sold as an open space, a limitless land expansive with free opportunity, California was actually, from its beginning, fissured by the interwoven needs of private and state interests. The reality of our world was born out of very specific moments and choices, a construction that is neither organic nor inevitable. California Company Town by Lee Anne Schmitt, is a portrait of the infringement of corporate ideology in the logic of everyday life. It casts a probing, clear-eyed gaze at the landscape of California towns abandoned by the industries that created them—onetime boom-towns now haunted by the twilight of the American promise.

The film premiered at the REDCAT theater in Los Angeles in 2008; it went on to screen in over 45 festivals worldwide, including the Rotterdam Film Festival, Marseilles International Documentary Festival, The Documentary Fortnight at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Full Frame Documentary Festival, Buenos Aires Festival International Festival of Independent Cinema, and the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival.

Lee Anne Schmitt is a writer and director of essay films and performances, work that exists in the juncture between fiction and documentary. A versatile multidisciplinary artist whose practice extends from film and performance to photography and writing, she creates evocative, deeply felt works that consider everyday elements of American life as cultural ritual, including a series of cinematic investigations of the intersections of landscape with personal memory (Las Vegas, 2000), with the history of the American Left (Awake and Sing, 2003), and with urban development (The Wash, 2005).

Interested in the politics of space, as expressed in the specific medium of film, her work often relies on the union of image and text, and the disparities between the phenomena and meaning each present.

Her film and video work has screened internationally, at venues that include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, SF MOMA, The Cinema du Reel at the George Pompidou Center in Paris, Anthology Film Archives in New York, and the Pacific Film Archives in San Francisco.

Additional Filmography

• The Last Buffalo Hunt (co-dir Lee Lynch) (78 min.,16mm and video, 2011)
• The Wash (co-dir Lee Lynch) (20 min., super8 film, 2008)
• Awake and Sing (42 min., 16mm, 2003)
• Nightingale (14 min, 16mm, 2002)
• Las Vegas (7 Minutes, video, 2000)
• Jumping Portrait (8 min., video, 2000)
• Rise and Shine (16 min, video, 2000)

CalArts, Langley Hall

CRITICAL STUDIES: Three CalArts students have joined team Caltech in this year's upcoming International Genetically Engineered Machine competition. This Thursday they will present the animations and discuss the novelty of animating on a living screen. They will show petri dishes containing e. coli bacteria genetically modified to glow on exposure to projected light. These luminescent proteins were derived from jellyfish found off the California coast.

This event is free and open to the public. Contact Douglas Goodwin for more information: dgoodwin@calarts.edu.

Join us for a special sneak preview 3D screening of:

Frankenweenie
A film by Tim Burton

to benefit the Joe Ranft CalArts Alumni Scholarship Endowment at CalArts.

Established in memory of animator Joe Ranft, CalArts alumnus and the first head of story at Pixar. Established in 2005 by David and Nancy Bossert, the scholarship supports theater and animation students at CalArts.

• Check-in: 6 pm / Screening: 7 pm
• $50 - general seating
• $100 - reserved seating

Walt Disney Studio Theater
500 S. Buena Vista Street
Burbank, California 91521

Entrance and Parking are at the gate on Buena Vista Street.

Space is limited. Click here to purchase tickets. For any questions, please call 661 253-7727.