Calendar

CalArts, A404 - Black & White Studio

FILM/VIDEO: Video installation of two to six different artists with installations overlapping and raising new perceptions of a single piece of installation.

CalArts, The Wild Beast

MUSIC: Recital of various chamber/solo pieces, featuring music by John Eagle, Gavin Bryars and O. Messiaen.

Opening Reception
Saturday, December 1 | 6–9pm

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

REDCAT: The third in a trilogy of recent animated works, Raspberry Poser is New York-based artist Jordan Wolfson’s most ambitious synthesis of digital video, computer-generated imagery (CGI) and hand-drawn animation.  Read more

CalArts, Sharon Disney Lund Dance Theater

MUSIC | DANCE: An interdisciplinary performance exploring unconventional representations of female identity.

CalArts, Roy O. Disney Music Hall

MUSIC: Concert of various musical acts from the Singer/Songwriter recording project.

CalArts, Roy O. Disney Music Hall

MUSIC: The Jazz program presents visiting artist Kneebody, as part of the Jazz Forum class.

CalArts, Roy O. Disney Music Hall

MUSIC: Students of the North Indian Ensemble will perform an evening of music composed by Aashish Khan with musical instruments from all across the world.

CalArts, Roy O. Disney Music Hall

MUSIC: A concert showcasing student work from Introduction to Programming for Digital Artists.

CalArts, The Wild Beast

MUSIC: Violin and keyboard works by John Cage, performed by Yu-Ting Wu and Ryan Bancroft. There will be a Fender Rhodes.

CalArts, Langley Hall

INSTITUTE: A series of workshop discussions based around issues of the body, facilitated by Daniel Charon, MFA2 in Dance and Integrated Media.

Why does the body exist and what is its role? How are the body and the mind connected? What is the relationship of the body to space and the environment? What is the relationship of the body to technology? These and other questions will be addressed as topics of conversation. Sessions will include a guest presenter who will introduce a theme for the day followed by a moderated conversation.

The aim of these workshop discussions is to create inter-disciplinary conversation around a fundamental element of living, the body. These discussions will serve to inform and inspire a new project that will be realized next semester.

F200

ART: Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective artist, founded in 2004. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a "readymade artist" and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people's work. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art today.

• http://www.clairefontaine.ws/
• Read more about Claire Fontaine’s recent collaborative exhibition with Lucie Fontaine:http://www.thegreengallery.biz/exceptions

CalArts, Walt Disney Modular Theater

DANCE: CalArts The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance and REDCAT present the Winter Dance Concert, an evening of dance featuring work by faculty members Laurence Blake and Andre Tyson and a restaging of Twyla Tharp’s 1971 renowned work Torelli.  

Torelli, a work created by world-renowned choreographer Twyla Tharp in 1971, follows the course of a morning, starting with “down-to-earth” movement danced in silence and isolation that later develops a “rustic humor” as the movement is manipulated and set against the elegance of Guiseppi Torelli’s “Concerto in D Minor.”

Purchase tickets:

Thursday, December 6, 2012 - 8:00pm

Friday, December 7, 2012 - 8:00pm

Saturday, December 8, 2012 - 8:00pm

CalArts, Coffeehouse Theater

THEATER: A movement piece exploring democratic behavior and the current American political climate, In Decision is an original performance devised and directed by theater and dance artist, Michael Sakamoto in collaboration with performers.

In Decision combines text, butoh inspired movement, and media, as the cast examines such issues as climate crisis, media-driven politics, social intolerance, racial privilege, gender roles, and others. Reflecting on what is required for a critical citizenry through the performers own stories, In Decision takes the audience on a theatrical journey through a cross-section of a generation inheriting a legacy of national hubris, massive debt, and global warming.

Reserve tickets:

Friday, December 7, 2012 - 7:00pm

Saturday, December 8, 2012 - 1:00pm

Saturday, December 8, 2012 - 7:00pm

Monday, December 10, 2012 - 7:00pm

CalArts, Roy O. Disney Music Hall

MUSIC: Songs and works from students of the Musical Arts Program.

CalArts, The Wild Beast

MUSIC: Mid-residency recital for vocal performance major Jacquelyn Owens featuring music by Copland, Fauré, Debussy, Purcell and more.

CalArts, Roy O. Disney Music Hall

MUSIC: Composition recital featuring the premiere of new works by the Kafka Café Orchestra.

CalArts, Roy O. Disney Music Hall

MUSIC: Concert featuring special guest artist Art Lande, with Cathlene Pineda (piano) and Tina Raymond (drums).

CalArts, The Wild Beast

MUSIC | THEATER: Solo and group improvised music theater showcases incorporating various forms of performance art and music.

REDCAT: Transposing the intellectual power and emotional energy of MacArthur genius Anne Carson’s poetry to the stage, Bouchard’s electronic score incorporates live voice, trumpet, trombone, accordion and piano—parts robustly performed by Bellows and Brass under the direction of Keith Turnbull.  Read more

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CalArts, Bijou Theater

FILM/VIDEO: Structuring Strategies presents A Modern Convenience (2012) and other work by experimental animator and CalArts faculty member Maureen Selwood.

Animators like Maureen Selwood are constantly exploring the relationship between traditional concepts and techniques, and the 'modernity' of the form. This 'philosophic' approach can then be extended to teaching and alternative forms of exhibition, as well as validating the purpose of the art. - Paul Wells

Selwood's works seem to enrich the field of animation with shades and colors worthy of the end of the millennium's new wave of mass media: the taste for meticulous observation of female childhood and adolescence, conceived as a period of perceiving others, sweetly disquieting...as well as an elated and apparently naive use of pop culture's visual mythology. - Mario Sesti

“It is so rare to see a really thoughtful, complex multi-screen environment ... made me feel good all day! Selwood got the perfect balance between the very real photographic space and the flat, vivid colors of the animation...and the score as well.  
But I think the best part was the interesting unpredictability of the way the imagery of the three screens relate to one another.” -Pat O’Neill

Program

•    A MODERN CONVENIENCE 5 min. 39 sec. 2012
Images are embedded in a complete wash cycle performed in an obsolete wringer washing machine; having been moved inside the private, domestic sphere, laundry is now another factor of social  alienation.

•    FLYING CIRCUS: AN IMAGINED MEMOIR min. 1995
I loosely adapted Parade, an opera by Picasso, Cocteau and Satie. I then instilled a childhood memory to play with the circus and its constantly shifting moods. (MS)

•    HAIL MARY 4 min. 1998
A woman’s voice obsessively uses numbers every time she tells us something, using a set of rosary beads. This allows her to keep her memories alive and to give meaning to the traces left by her life.

•    DRAWING LESSONS 6 min. 2006
Sleepless nights become a catalyst for undertaking the exercise “Upside Down Drawing” from Betty Edwards’s book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. The female protagonist entertains a relationship with the voice on the audiotape included in the book…

•    AS YOU DESIRE ME 2009 9 min. 2009
I lived in Rome for a year and became inspired by the emotional qualities of the city that surrounded me. The Iraq War was declared and the city responded to this in powerful ways. After returning to Los Angeles, I created a three-channel event using surrealistic characters in real settings as a way to address sorrow and catastrophe. One of the components is based on a poem by Charles Simic, Empire of Dreams. (MS)

•    RULES OF THE UNIVERSE 9 min. 2009

•    HOW MUCH BETTER IF PLYMOUTH ROCK HAD LANDED ON THE PILGRIMS 11 min. 43 sec. 2012

•    MISTAKEN IDENTITY 28 min. 2001
Mistaken Identity revisits the forgotten characters and deserted landscapes of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Broken steps, shot under the ocean pier and the expressways, are re-photographed and then drawn over to produce a commentary on the artifice of  cinema and memory.

BLUR+SHARPEN: MAUREEN SELWOOD’S POETRY
by Holly Willis, June 29, 2009

"By moving eastward in the city of Los Angeles I became aware of the forgotten characters and the deserted landscapes from film noir," explains Maureen Selwood, an artist and CalArts faculty member whose multi-screen projection titled As You Desire Me is on view as part of the C.O.L.A. 2009 Exhibition at the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery. Selwood goes on to explain that she adopted a kind of "system" for looking at LA by reimagining particular noir characters superimposed over the city's environs. This in turn fed her C.O.L.A. project, which was initiated in Italy a couple of years ago while the artist was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Rather than working with noir characters, however, Selwood instead grappled with notions of dislocation, grief and loss, and created what she calls "time-based poems." The resulting project is indeed akin to poetry, in its piercing sadness that is at once palpable and ephemeral. How do these animated poems function?
 
Entering the gallery, you find three suspended scrims featuring projections of live action footage with animations layered over them. Each is titled. In I Am Measuring You, a weary dog roams through desolate streets, while in A Shoe Falls, abject grief and mourning cause women to weep where rivers flow through forlorn branches. In Empire of Dreams, on the third screen, Selwood references Charles Simic's poem of the same title, which includes the lines, "It's always evening/In an occupied country..." A fourth animation, very different in tone and style and titled Rules of the Universe, plays on a monitor in a separate room. While Selwood has described the fourth part as a depiction of Rome's resilience, the power of the project resides in the first room, as you stand at the nexus point of three images of loss, and a representation of time as that haunting gap between the cold and barren landscape, and the people who traverse it. We're present in the world only briefly, the piece shows us, searching, like the tired hound at dusk. While Selwood's themes may sound grim, the project achieves the iridescent voltage of great poetry, where words strung together produce a jolt. The show's up for two more weeks: don't miss the experience of As You Desire Me!
C.O.L.A. 2009 Exhibition

About the Artist

MAUREEN SELWOOD utilizes hand-drawn animation and live-action footage for films, installations, and performances. The role played by external devices in our lives and their totemic value often triggers Selwood’s process. Her work is inspired by a reflection on the nature of animation and drawing. In her most recent film, A Modern Convenience (2012), a machine becomes a substitute for intimacy against the backdrop of Niagara Falls and is designed to be accompanied by live performance. As You Desire Me (2009), the single-channel version of an installation inspired by her residence at the American Academy in Rome at the beginning of the Iraq War, confronts sorrow and catastrophe. How Much Better If Plymouth Rock Had Landed On The Pilgrims (2012), a hallucinogenic trip of the pilgrims’ trip across the Atlantic, is a mash up of animation techniques. In Hail Mary (1998) a centuries old prayer morphs into a humorous black and white memoir. The expressively rendered Drawing Lessons (2006) sublimates a meditation on drawing and nature. In Mistaken Identity (2001), Selwood creates an alluring deconstruction of the 1955 noir classic Kiss Me Deadly.

Flying Circus: An Imagined Memoir (1995), Pearls (1988), This Is Just To Say (1987), The Rug (1985) and Odalisque (1980) have won many international prizes and have been screened at Annecy International Animation Festival, New York Film Festival, Ottawa Animation Festival, Stuttgart FF, Anima Mundi, Hong Kong FF, USA FF, Ann Arbor, Black Maria, Northwest Film Center, Venice Biennale, ANIMAC (Spain) and many others in the US and abroad and on television. Her drawings have been exhibited at The Drawing Center (NYC), Track 16 Gallery (Los Angeles), Arteko (Spain) and others.  

Selwood has participated in international workshops working with artists and students and curating films, PACT Essen, Germany; Arteleku, Spain; Cilect, Mexico City: Korean National University of Arts, Korea; Jakarta Institute for the Arts, Indonesia; Matita Animation Festival, Italy and others.

Selwood has been a recipient of grants from the Center for Cultural Innovation (Los Angeles), C.O.L.A Individual Artists Fellowship (LA), the John Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, The Jerome Foundation, The American Film Institute and a visiting artist residency at the MacDowell Colony and ARTELUKU (Spain). She was the first animation artist to be awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. She makes her home in Los Angeles.

CalArts, Coffeehouse Theater

THEATER: An evening of improvised songs and music, culminating in a one-act improvised musical.

CalArts, Roy O. Disney Music Hall

MUSIC: Concert featuring beginning and advanced improv ensembles.

CalArts, Tatum Lounge

INTEGRATED MEDIA: This interactive piece is half of a two-way installation.  Guests will be invited to "sit to tea" with the image of the person projected on an RP screen.

CalArts, Butler Building 4

CRITICAL STUDIES: Miranda Mellis was born and raised in San Francisco, and earned a BA from Naropa University and an MFA from Brown University. She is the author of The Spokes (Solid Objects, 2012), None of This Is Real (Sidebrow Press, 2011) and Materialisms (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs). Her first novel, The Revisionist, has been translated into Italian by Leonardo Luccone (Nutrimenti, 2008) and Croatian by Zoran Rosko (Quorum, 2009). The Revisionist was a finalist for The Believer 2007 Book Award.

Mellis has received The John Hawkes Prize in Fiction, The Michael Harper Praxis Prize, and an NEH Independent Research Grant. Her writing has appeared in various journals & magazines including Conjunctions, Harper's, McSweeney's, The Believer, Cabinet and Fence. Her writing also appears in several anthologies including Conversations at The War Time Cafe and California Video: Artists and Histories.  Currently she is working on a story with images in collaboration with artist Megan Vossler called The Quarry, due out from Trafficker in 2013. She is a coeditor at The Encyclopedia Project and teaches at The Evergreen State College. In response to the question, “What is experimental writing,” Mellis said, Writing – even taking inventories which is how writing started – involves oscillations: losing and finding, locating and dislocating, delay and arrival, sleeping and waking, tracking and losing track. Experimental writers think of language as a medium and therefore do not ignore the fact that language, even univocal and transactional language (maybe even especially so) is imbricated with political life and systems: not neutral, after all, its what laws, mortgages, curses, roles, and rites of institution are made of.