Luminous Variations in the City Skies (2019) by Giuseppe Spina
CROSSROADS 2020 – program 4
all those things you used to feel
program online August 25–September 30
Program opens with a series of quietly lyrical and observational works: reveries of landscape, the celestial heavens and the body; mediumistic studies of corporeal time and of eternity. These slowly give way explorations of the electronic ether and the mediation of subjectivity. Not without humor, these oblique conundra present uncanny intermediated non-places in which intimacy becomes increasingly alien and where buildings and other mysterious objects assert themselves.
SCREENING: Westinghouse One (2019) by Kevin Jerome Everson (livestream only); mockingbird (2020) by Kevin Jerome Everson (livestream only); Die Nacht (2017-2019) by Wenhua Shi; liminal poem (2019) by Susan DeLeo; Luminous Variations in the City Skies (2019) by Giuseppe Spina; Sympathetic Bodies (2018) by Margaret Rorison; Traces (2020) by Carleen Maur; where i don’t meet you (2019) by Charlotte Clermont; Plants Are Like People (2018) by Charlotte Clermont; Story of the Dreaming Water, Chapter One (2018) by Brittany Gravely; The Tower (2019) by Silvestar Kolbas; Interbeing (2018) by Martina Hoogland Ivanow; My Favorite Object (2019) by Meredith Moore
TRT: 65 minutes
Westinghouse One (2019) by Kevin Jerome Everson
Westinghouse One is about an old consumer product produced at the Westinghouse factory in Mansfield, Ohio in the 1960s. (Kevin Jerome Everson)
© Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; Trilobite-Arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures
mockingbird (2020) by Kevin Jerome Everson
A film about a birdwatcher looking for the state bird of Mississippi. (Kevin Jerome Everson)
© Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; Trilobite-Arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures
Die Nacht (2017-2019) by Wenhua Shi
Prelude to Senses of Time [a solo exhibition by Wenhua Shi at RCM: the Museum of Classic Art, Nanjing]: depicts the lyrical and poetic passage of time. The work reflects on time and focuses on defining subjective and perceptual time with close attention to stillness, decay, disappearance and ruins. Dedicated to Phil Solomon. (Wenhua Shi)
liminal poem (2019) by Susan DeLeo
In a hypnotic reverie, one meanders into and out of several earthly dreamscapes, free from the constraints of time and space. Shot on Super 8mm. (Susan DeLeo)
Luminous Variations in the City Skies (2019) by Giuseppe Spina
At Bologna’s Specola Tower, 1932–1957, an optical technology was invented which would revolutionize astronomy. The tower’s four floors were perforated and a series of hexagonal mirrors was installed at its base, creating a giant telescope of 2×24 meters. A mobile camera was set at right angles to the mirrors and thousands of glass plates where exposed which offered a systematic overview of the city’s zenithal sky. Thirty years of research were necessary for the astronomer Guido Horn D’Arturo to invent the specchio a tasselli—also called multimirror or segmented mirror—an archetype of today’s most advanced telescopes. Horn D’Arturo’s photographic plates are now also full of spots and traces of deteriorated emulsions. This film is composed of scans and blow-ups of these plates. (Giuseppe Spina)
Sympathetic Bodies (2018) by Margaret Rorison
This film was made for the track, “Sympathetic Bodies” by Byron Westbrook from his LP Body Consonance (2017, Hands in the Dark). All footage was hand-processed and shot on 16mm B&W reversal film, incorporating rephotography with the JK Optical Printer. This work was made with the support from Crater Lab in Barcelona. (Margaret Rorison)
Traces (2020) by Carleen Maur
Retracing the human movements and climaxes between electric bills and coastal walks. (Carleen Maur)
where i don't meet you (2019) by Charlotte Clermont
Shot on Super 8, where i don’t meet you is based on its own physicality by the means of a DIY hand processing technique, where the film’s materiality is treated not only as a medium but also as a subject. Its narrative structure reflects a work on film deconstruction, which joins an unpredictable and experimental universe. Showing a series of figurative shots accompanied by textual sequences, formal and psychological associations are developed between each of the images. Through a confusing poetry, a filmic atmosphere unfolds in a “non-place,” which recalls a moment lost between two time-spaces. (Charlotte Clermont)
Plants Are Like People (2018) by Charlotte Clermont
Plants Are Like People composes a precise rhythm, where, each second, archive footage, cryptic texts and performances alternate to create an enigmatic and sensual dialogue. (Charlotte Clermont)
Story of the Dreaming Water, Chapter One (2018) by Brittany Gravely
Maybe there was an opening, and they wandered through… (Brittany Gravely)
The Tower (2019) by Silvestar Kolbas
Agrokor was the largest privately-owned company in Croatia until its crash in 2017. The corporation which once employed 60 thousand workers ended up in debt, the owner is under investigation and the firm was completely restructured. The corporation headquarters were located in the Cibona Tower—one of the symbols of progress and optimism inherited from the socialist times. Weaving the narrative from the mosaic of reflexive units in constant flux, gliding across the Tower’s facade, this film seeks to reveal how changes in the socio-political reality reflect on its citizens. In the country ruled by a mesh of crime, politics and economy, could we establish the responsibility for the breakdown of one political system and its worldview? (Silvestar Kolbas)
Interbeing (2018) by Martina Hoogland Ivanow
Interbeing is based on documentation of social structures and their different approaches to trust and fear. The material is presented through a thermal camera whose optics do not register what is visible to the eye but render shades of temperature, a perspective granting all living beings the same conditions of representation. The camera also makes a heat shadow visible upon and after physical touch. The heat remains, like traces of utmost commonality in attempts at making direct contact, as well as in public, everyday chance encounters. (Martina Hoogland Ivanow)
My Favorite Object (2019) by Meredith Moore
Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods. (James Joyce: Ulysses)
Kevin Jerome Everson (US) lives and works in Charlottesville, Virginia. He holds a MFA from Ohio University and a BFA from the University of Akron. He is Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. His films have been the subject of mid-career retrospectives at the Tate Modern; Modern and Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul; Viennale (2014); Visions du Reel, Nyon; The Whitney Museum of American Art and Centre Pompidou. His work was featured at the 2008, 2012, and 2017 Whitney Biennials and the 2013 Sharjah Biennial. Everson was awarded the 2012 Alpert Award for Film/Video and co-curated the 2018 Flaherty Film Seminar with writer/curator Greg DeCuir Jr. In addition to creating paintings, sculptures and photographs, Everson’s films—including nine features and over 130 short form works—have been exhibited at film festivals worldwide.
Wenhua Shi (China/US) pursues a poetic approach to moving image making and investigates conceptual depth in film, video, interactive installations and sound sculptures. His work has been presented at museums, galleries and film festivals, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, European Media Art Festival, FLEFF, Athens Film and Video Festival, Light Field, Engauge Film Festival, Antimatter, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, and more. He has received awards including the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.
Susan DeLeo (US) is a multimedia artist using experimental film/video, sound, installation and photography to explore the poetics of memory, loss and the ethereal within the elemental/natural worlds. She has a 5th year Diploma in Studio Arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and was a recipient of the Clarissa Bartlett Traveling Scholarship Award.She also studied film and photography at Mass College of Art. Being a musician and singer, she often composes sound for her films. She exhibits and screens nationally and internationally and is a member of the Boston based AgX Film Collective.
Giuseppe Spina (Italy) is an Italian filmmaker based in Bologna. His films have screened in numerous international festivals, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, EMAF—European Media Art Festival and the Annecy International Animated Film Festival. He is the co-founder of Nomadica, an international network of artists and intellectuals focused on experimental cinema.
Margaret Rorison (US) is filmmaker and curator from Baltimore MD. Her recent films explore the visceral nature of memory and its dialogue between space and experience. She is interested in the potentials of storytelling through the use of 16mm projection and sound, often collaborating with sound artists, exploring ways in which the image and machine can converse. Her work has been exhibited at Edinburgh International Film Festival, Images Festival, Miami PULSE Art Fair, The Walker Art Center and The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.. She is the co-founder and curator of the experimental film series, Sight Unseen, which has been running since June of 2012. She works as an audiovisual specialist at The National Gallery of Art and teaches filmmaking and photography at The Baltimore School for The Arts.
Carleen Maur (US) is an experimental film and video artist. Her work examines the intersections between sexuality, camouflage and surveillance.
Charlotte Clermont’s (Canada) video and sound work addresses the concept of time through symbolic and emotional associations. Often collaborating with others, she uses analogue recording devices and works with the malleability of film and magnetic tape to build space-times that reside between imagination and memory, the past and the present. With a Bachelor’s degree in Studio Arts from Concordia University, she has exhibited in Canada and internationally at festivals and exhibitions including the Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma (Canada), Antimatter (Canada), the Paris Festival for Different and Experimental Cinema, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Künstlerhaus Bethanian (Germany), Transient Visions (United States), Arctic Moving Image and Film Festival (Norway) and Edinburgh International Film Festival (Scotland). She has been selected for artist residencies in Japan, the United States and Italy. Her works are distributed by Vidéographe and Winnipeg Film Group.
Artistically Brittany Gravely (US) has focused on 16mm film for the past several years, but also creates works in many other media. Currently, she creates expanded and non-expanded cinema projects of a more mystical nature in Magical Approach with Ken Linehan. Recently, their films screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, Artifact, Fracto, CROSSROADS, Chicago Underground and Antimatter, among other festivals. She also works as the publicist and designer for the Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge, MA and is a founding member of the artist-run film lab AgX.
Silvestar Kolbas (Croatia) is a cinematographer, photographer and film director. He graduated in Film and TV Camera in 1982 from the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb. Today he is a full-time professor at the same school. As a cinematographer, he has made several features, shorts, documentaries, TV films and series. He also directed several personal, self-reflective experimental documentaries in which he also reflects on the nature of visual media.
Martina Hoogland Ivanow (Sweden) is an artist based in Stockholm, Sweden working mainly with photography but also with film. An interest in what is complex and contradictory is a common thread through her work, in which the photographic process becomes an investigation into our often dualistic nature and how the self relates to the outside world.
Meredith Moore (US) is a filmmaker and artist living in Baltimore, MD. Her work is experimental in nature and often uses a mix of both old and new technologies. Her films have screened at various film festivals and venues around the world including Anthology Film Archives, Athens International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, London’s Roundhouse, the Maryland Film Festival, Cucalorus Film Festival, Nonplussed Fest, Seattle Transmedia & International Film Festival, Washington Project for the Arts, and The Walters Art Museum. Meredith is a professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art in the Film & Video Department and also works in audiovisual archives. She is also the founder and curator of Secret Psychic Cinema—a screening and workshop series which showcases avant-garde and experimental works—is on the screening committee for the Maryland Film Festival and is a member of the Baltimore Video Collective which runs Beyond Video, a non-profit film lending library in Baltimore City.