Calendar

CalArts, Main Gallery

FILM/VIDEO: Character Animation Gallery Show.

CalArts, Bijou Theater

FILM/VIDEO: Structuring Strategies presents A Modern Convenience (2012) and other work.

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:
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•   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.

•   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 of based on a poem by Charles Simic, Empire of  Dreams. (MS)

•   FLYING CIRCUS: AN IMAGINED MEMOIR min. 1995
I loosely adapter 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)

•   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…

•   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.

•   ODALISQUE 12 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

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.

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ART: Karen Atkinson is an installation artist, independent curator and founder of Side Street Projects, a nonprofit artist-run organization in Los Angeles which exhibits the work of artists internationally. She has exhibited and curated throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, Cuba, Japan and South Africa and was included in the Fifth Havana Biennial in Cuba. She has curated numerous gallery and traveling exhibitions and public projects, including the For the Time Being parking meter project, and Projections: intermission images — slides projected in commercial theaters between films. She has produced a number of projects designed for the web and digital media. She teaches Getting Your Sh*t Together workshops/classes both at CalArts and in the City of Los Angeles as well as around the country. She founded an artist run business for artists called GYST Ink, which creates software for visual artists, has support services and a newsletter about professional practices for artists. 

www.karenatkinsonstudio.org

Aiming for a painting that would stand outside the codes of representation, after BMPT’s and Support/Surface’s work of the sixties and early seventies, Bernard Brunon ended-up painting houses. "Painting a wall results in a painting of the wall, in the Modernist tradition, but does not produce an image of the wall." This led him to set-up a house-painting business, That’s Painting Productions, to which he gave the motto: “With Less to Look At, There’s More To Think About.” By managing a house-painting company, he sets painting, and art-making, within the concrete experience ofsocial and economic reality of the everyday; thus fulfilling the wish of many avant-gardes: the merging of art and life. That’s Painting Productions’s work clashes because it is situated at the junction of two economic fields that are a priori incompatible.

www.bernardbrunon.com

CalArts, The Wild Beast

MUSIC: Dance, music, media, film, electronics. An experiment in radical self-expression via the 10 principles of Burning Man.

CalArts, Bijou Theater

FILM/VIDEO: “The enigmatic cinema of Laida Lertxundi resists easy categorization. Her works could be described as landscape films, set as they are against the backdrop of Southern California’s deserts and mountains, its blue skies and wild shores. These environments are sparsely populated with non-actors, who are sometimes wandering, sometimes still. Sequences are repeated and reframed, calling back to one another; recorded music plays within the world of the film, taking on the character not of a soundtrack but of a field recording. Narratives are hinted at, flirted with, yet never realized. Her films function as both exactingly arranged experiments with the syntax of film language and lovesick daydreams, fragmented and full of longing.”
-Whitney Biennial 2012

Program:
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Farce Sensationelle
2009, 2.5 min, 35mm
“Laida Lertxundi's Farce Sensationelle!, a self-portrait and simultaneous homage to Dziga Vertov, fusing the artist's eye with the Kino-eye.” –Images Festival

Footnotes to a House of Love
2007, 13 min, 16mm
“Laida Lertxundi ’s Footnotes to a House of Love, also set in southern California, was in some ways the aftermath to the apocalyptic buildup of SpaceDisco-One. The desert, so often a stand-in for other places imagined by Hollywood, here is barren and bright, set to the tune of Leslie Gore and the Kinks playing through an intrepid little tape deck. The tinny sound carries through a broken down house, a house without walls and whose door falls down the moment someone tries to open it. People drift by and a couple makes love on a sheet laid out in the sand; it’s not clear where the house ends and the desert begins. The music plays in most of the film like a radio signal, a relic of another time, now gone. The film is pervaded with the sense of something having happened, though we’re given only brief glimpses of what came after.” –Genevieve Yue, Senses of Cinema

“The Grand prize of Basque Cinema, Footnotes to a House of Love, by Laida Lertxundi, begins by weaving a series of brushstrokes in the form of annotations, using fragmentation (and the partial use of off frame) and long shots to transform the non-actor into non-character. Maneuver by which all is left is the referent of the California desert landscape. There is a break with cinematographic boundaries and a departure into the terrain of video art.” –Cahiers Du Cinema, Spain

My Tears Are Dry
2009, 4 min, 16mm
“My Tears are Dry (2009) is even more minimalist in its riddling structure. Lertxundi cuts between an image of a woman’s torso on a bed, playing and rewinding the same snip of Hoagy Lands’ title ballad, and another woman sitting on a couch strumming a dissonant chord. Out of this frustrated syntax comes blessed continuity. The song breaks through and sets in motion a weightless daydream borrowed from Bruce Baillie’s 1966 single-shot film, All My Life (included on the same program along with other antecedents by Hollis Frampton and Morgan Fisher): in place of his horizontal pan across flowers, Lertxundi tilts her camera up past palms towards the same pale blue sky. Poignant without object, the film delivers a gentle spiritual plea for persistence.”
– Max Goldberg, San Francisco Bay Guardian

Cry When it Happens / Llora Cuando Te Pase
2010, 14 min, 16mm
“Los Angeles City Hall is reflected onto the window of the Paradise Motel. It serves as an anchor for this traversal through the natural expanse of California. Here, we discover a restrained psychodrama of play, loss, and the transformation of everyday habitats. Music appears across the interiors and exteriors and speaks of limitlessness and longing.”–http://laidalertxundi.com

“Cry When It Happens(…) sees characters with their vision subsumed in the portholes of dingy technology-and eventually takes on their perspective. In the first image, two girls splay on a couch, antiparallel but touching, vaguely grinning, with the light intensified on their arms and faces. Already the film's both naturalistic, with feeling—a delimited space, real-time hold, physical respite, sense of the bodies touching cloth on all sides—and slightly surreal: their sense of comfort, huddling, belied by the unnecessarily tight squeeze. Eventually two figures in an LA motel room watch TV footage of the sky while one fingers an accordion, and some minutes later, that sky footage becomes the film itself, God's heavens accompanied by the Blue Rondos' "Little Baby." – David Phelps, The L Magazine

A Lax Riddle Unit
2011, 6min, 16mm, color, sound
“In a Los Angeles interior, moving walls for loss. Practicing a song to a loved one. A film of the feminine structuring body.” –http://laidalertxundi.com

“Laida Lertxundi’s A Lax Riddle Unit (2011) also shows a series of gentle transformations. Each of the film’s turns reveals a surprise: a woman suddenly appearing in bed, and, from behind an album cover, her shy smile. With the film’s elements of Los Angeles landscape, houseplants, and James Carr’s plaintive “Love Attack,” continually rearranged like the letters of the title, which is an anagram for Lertxundi’s own name, there is the sense of kaleidoscopic rotation, breathtaking views made with the slightest of movements: changing light, cuts, and slowly revolving camera pans.”– Genevieve Yue, reverseshot.com

“A Lax Riddle Unit (2011) opens on the curled lip of James Carr’s soul number “Love Attack” and a cragged landscape view. The long take floods with softening light, but then a terrifically decisive cut deposits us in the flat light of an apartment. The sudden switch bears the imprint of both insight and displacement. Leafy potted plants reach for the natural light framed in a window, and Carr’s wail gives way to Robert Wyatt’s impressionism: a different emotional architecture entirely. The camera turns slow pirouettes through the apartment, passing over an amplifier (always this confusion about the relationship between sight and sound), a woman kneeling to play a keyboard, some records, and then catching up with her again sprawled in bed. As is often the case in Lertxundi’s films, the composition does not settle on the human form in the usual way. The residue of the apartment, oddly reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963), develops until a few shots later we end with a bleeding red dusk spreading across Los Angeles — an image pitched on the edge of surrender.”
– Max Goldberg, San Francisco Bay Guardian

Laida Lertxundi makes films with non-actors, landscapes and sounds. Her work has been selected for the 2012 Whitney Biennial, MoMA, LACMA, the Viennale, Views from the Avant Garde at the New York Film Festival, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. She received the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 48th Ann Arbor Film Festival and was named as one of the “25 Filmmakers for the 21st Century” in Film Comment’s Avant-Garde Poll. She is a film and video curator in the U.S. and Spain and teaches film at the University of California San Diego.

http://laidalertxundi.com

CalArts, The Walt Disney Modular Theater

THEATER: Roger Guenveur Smith's Rodney King troubles the line between documentary, biography and theater in its recovery of King. Rodney King himself was troubled by being reduced to a symbol of racial conflict through his brutalization at the hands of the LAPD and 1992's LA uprisings that followed their trial.

In light of the more recent deaths of Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant and others, Rodney King is hauntingly urgent and invites us to ask broader questions about the aesthetics and politics of re-enactment; how art, mass and social media construct myths; what a city wants to remember; and how race often finds itself at sites of violence committed in the community's name.

A panel discussion will follow the performance, curated by Douglas Kearney, School of Critical Studies.

Register to attend

CalArts, Butler Building 4

CRITICAL STUDIES: Justin Torres is the author of We the Animals, a novel comprised of portraits and vignettes, published by Random House, to much deserved acclaim, in 2011.  He grew up in upstate New York. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Glimmer Train, and other publications. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he is a recipient of the Rolón United States Artist Fellowship in Literature, and is now a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. He has worked as a farmhand, a dog-walker, a creative writing teacher, and a bookseller.

About writing his first novel, he says, For me, the magic of fiction lies in the words chosen and the structure of the sentences. I could write about men on Mars or about a childhood similar to my own, but my goal would be the same: get the words right, cast a spell.

CalArts, Bijou Theater

Le Gamin au vélo / The Kid with a Bike
Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne
2011 / 87 min.

FILM/VIDEO: The sublime tale of love and redemption begins with an 11-year-old boy in frantic, desperate motion. Refusing to acknowledge that he’s been abandoned by his father, Cyril escapes the children’s home where he’s been living. As the authorities from the children’s home catch up with him, Cyril, refusing to return, tightly grips a total stranger, a woman named Samantha, who will prove to be the heartbroken boy’s savior.

This event is part of The Tournées Festival, the weekly series of new French films on campus.

Support for the Tournées Festival is provided by:

• Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States / Centre National de la Cinématographie et l’Image Animée
• CampusFrance / Florence Gould Foundation / highbrow entertainment
• www.facecouncil.org

CalArts, The Wild Beast

MUSIC: A re-enactment of pagan rituals associated with the winter solstice of people in the Baltic region.

CalArts, Roy O. Disney Music Hall

MUSIC: John Schwerbel and Newman Wolf will perform a unique night of music—Newman will present a DJ/music tech set and John will present a wide-ranging program of jazz and improvised music from various groups.

CalArts, Roy O. Disney Music Hall

MUSIC: The event will begin with George's instrumental quartet (guitar, bass, drum, trumpet) followed by a guitar duo.  After intermission, Ricky will begin his half of the recital performing solo pieces (with live band performance in between).

CalArts, Bijou Theater

FILM/VIDEO: Pincus Finster is in way over his head: trying to find a way to stall his father’s Parkinson’s, halfheartedly taking up yoga to meet girls, and letting his only friend, Dietmar, an aging German illegal alien, get drunk and sleep in the homes they’re supposed to be remodeling. Pincus spends his time stoned and fumbling for some sort of spiritual truth. Drawing from his own life, director and writer David Fenster has cast his family and friends (including his father, Paul Fenster, who has been living with Parkinson’s for 13 years) and woven documentary footage shot in and around his hometown of Miami, Florida, into the story, capturing the singular beauty of a city that is so often misrepresented.

West Hollywood Public Library, Common Room

CRITICAL STUDIES: A panel with Peter Gadol (Otis College of Art and Design) and Martín Plot (CalArts)

Peter Gadol graduated from Harvard College in 1986. He is the author of six books: Coyote (Crown, 1990), The Mystery Roast (Crown, 1993), Closer to the Sun (Picador USA, 1996), The Long Rain (Picador USA, 1997), Light at Dusk (Picador USA, 2000) and Silver Lake (Tyrus Books, 2009). He has taught at UCLA and CalArts and is now an Associate Professor in the Graduate Writing Program at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. Gadol is writing an epic novel about twentieth-century design titled American Modern.

Martín Plot teaches in the Aesthetics & Politics Program in the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts. He is the author of Indivisible (2011), La Carne de lo Social (2008), and El Kitsch Político (2003). He has also edited and co-edited several books, and published in Continental Philosophy Review, Constellations, Theory and Event, Umbrales, International Journal of Communication, Le monde diplomatique and Punto de vista, among other journals and reviews.

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ART: Suné Woods is an artist based in Los Angeles. She uses photography, collage, and video to engage themes of culture, landscape, and history. Her work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Lowe Art Museum, Miami; School of the International Center of Photography, New York; Time Life Building, New York; and The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, and Koplin Del Rio, Los Angeles. She received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2010. She will be in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in the summer 2013.

www.sunewoods.com