and so it came about (A Tale of Consequential Dormancy) (2023) by Charlotte Pryce
Saturday, August 31, 2024, 6:00 pm
CROSSROADS 2024 – program 5
seen and not seen, they ventured inside
Personal elaborations of myth and private exploration bookend this program of hermetic allegory and luminous reverie, with a set of dazzlingly radiant in-camera compositions and alchemically material investigations forming the program’s sensuously igneous core. Within these visual fables, gestures of guardianship smolder like inextinguishable embers, breathing and alive.
SCREENING:
Our Cave (2024) by Heehyun Choi (South Korea/US); digital video, color, sound, 23 minutes. Elephant’s Foot (2023) by Ellie Vanderlip (US); digital video, color, sound, 6 minutes. Interlude (2023) by Deborah S. Phillips (Germany); 16mm, color, silent, 2 minutes. Sunprints 1,2,3 (2022) by Barbara Sternberg (Canada); 16mm, color, silent, 12 minutes, print from the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. to open a window (2023) by Craig Scheihing (US); 16mm, color, silent, 2 minutes. sunspots, burnt into my heart (2023) by Craig Scheihing (US); 16mm, color, silent, 3 minutes. Vignette: Legs (2024) by Janelle VanderKelen (US); digital video, color, sound, 1 minute. and so it came about (A Tale of Consequential Dormancy) (2023) by Charlotte Pryce (US/UK); digital video, color, sound, 13 minutes.TRT: 62 minutes
PROGRAM TICKETS: $12 General/$10 Cinematheque Members, Gray Area Members & students (with ID)
FESTIVAL PASSES: $110 General/$88 Cinematheque Members, Gray Area Members & students (with ID)
program community partner: Shapeshifters Cinema
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CROSSROADS 2024
Our Cave (2024) by Heehyun Choi
Magritte doubted Plato’s allegory of the cave through his painting The Human Condition (1935). In the 18th century Joseon Dynasty, Shin Don Bok put together the anecdote collection Hak San Han Eon, which includes a story of two people willingly venturing deep into a cave rather than seeking light outside, eventually reaching a completely different world. In this film, the two people become women and together they load the film into the camera. In the utter darkness where only the sound of water is heard, images emerge. In that place where everything is inverse, the camera becomes a watering can, a mirror and a teapot. (Heehyun Choi) north american premiere
Elephant’s Foot (2023) by Ellie Vanderlip
1986: Billowing clouds of debris from the environmental catastrophe at Chernobyl forever changed the chemical composition of earth’s surface. 2023: The water gurgling up from the Sacramento river headwaters at the base of Mount Shasta has taken 50 years to travel from sky to spring and thus emerges still unknowing of the fallout. (Ellie Vanderlip)
Interlude (2023) by Deborah S. Phillips
After a tough time, a little bit of lightness is called for itself. A search for beauty in the world around me. (Deborah S. Phillips)
Sunprints 1,2,3 (2022) by Barbara Sternberg
Based loosely on the tripartite plan of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso), the film was made by applying cyanotype chemistry to blank film exposed to sun. The resultant blue and white footage was then combined with camera footage in three sections: Into the Valley, Middle Ground, Radiance. (Barbara Sternberg)
to open a window (2023) by Craig Scheihing
a mirrored window makes a suggestion (Craig Scheihing) bay area premiere
sunspots, burnt into my heart (2023) by Craig Scheihing
a play on the light, lost in the woods, longing (Craig Scheihing) bay area premiere
Vignette: Legs (2024) by Janelle VanderKelen
This vignette draws inspiration from the playful human representations of hybrid and imaginary plants depicted in the margins of medieval manuscripts. The piece gains its name from the vine-like flourishes that sinuously organize these pages of human supposition which imbricate scientific knowledge and mysticism. (Janelle VanderKelen) world premiere
and so it came about (A Tale of Consequential Dormancy) (2023) by Charlotte Pryce
A mythological tale, retold and recast, unfurls on the periphery of a Common. The entangled intrigues of the seen and the unseen conspire to disclose an underland at once enticing and threatening. But what are the consequences of such trespassing between worlds? The film was made during the months and years of the pandemic; the result of an intermingling of species that in turn precipitated a global dormancy. Such events seemed terrifying and inexplicable and yet our folklore, myths and fairy tales are replete with such occurrences. My film revisits a vegetation myth and takes its title from the ecological process that occurs when organisms enter a dormant phase in response to adverse conditions. (Charlotte Pryce)
Heehyun Choi (South Korea/US) is a moving image artist from Seoul, South Korea whose practice is grounded on the interest in the physicality and virtuality in projected images, the unseen beings outside the camera frame, and the subjectivity and variability of the act of seeing. Her films have been screened internationally including at 25 FPS Festival, Images Festival, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive and Ann Arbor Film Festival where she received the Mariam Ghani Juror Award.
Ellie Vanderlip (US) is an experimental filmmaker based in San Francisco. She works primarily with found media to explore topics around sexuality, climate change, infrastructure and California history and identity.
Deborah S. Phillips (Germany) works in a number of different fields: as an artist as well as a translator and voice-over artist. From 1988–2001, she was an active member of the Braunschweig-based artists‘ collective LABORATORIUM, where she began working with film. In 2007 she co-founded Kunstverein Neukölln, a gallery and art centre. DSP’s films have been screened in more than 40 countries at a number of festivals.
Barbara Sternberg (Canada) has been making (experimental) films since the mid-1970s. Her films have been screened widely in North America and Europe in artist-run centres and galleries, including the prestigious Museum of Modern Art in New York, George Pompidou Centre in Paris and Ontario Cinematheque in Toronto. Her films are in the collections of Queen’s University, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada. Sternberg has also participated in gallery exhibitions with mixed media installations, performance art and videos. She was co-founder of Struts gallery in Sackville, New Brunswick, was a founding member of Pleasure Dome: Film Artists Exhibition Group in Toronto and taught in Film and Visual Arts at York University.
Craig Scheihing (US) is an artist based in New York City. His work has been screened, performed and exhibited around the world in film festivals, museums, basements, bars, beneath bridges, in cinemas, vacant lots, galleries, garages, universities, yards and in-between.
Janelle VanderKelen (US) is an artist, curator and educator currently based in Knoxville TN. Her films and intermedia installations imagine alternative acts of relation between imperfect bodies (human, vegetal, geological or otherwise) and make visible the agency of plants through experimental time-based media processes.
Charlotte Pryce (US/UK) has been making films and optical objects since 1986. She has taught experimental film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Academy of Art (San Francisco), Kent Institute of Design (Canterbury, England) and is currently a faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts (Los Angeles). She is a graduate of the Slade School of Art, University College London (BFA) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA). In 2013 the Los Angeles Film Critics Association honored her with the Douglass Edwards Award for best experimental cinema achievement. In 2019, she was honored with career retrospectives at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Bozar (Brussels), Centre Pompidou (Paris) and the [S8] Mostra de Cinema Periferico.