Screening: aCinema Summer Screening Series Saturday, July 20th at 3PM

Join us for the first-ever aCinema Summer Screening Series, featuring a weekend of six programs curated by Takahiro Suzuki and Janelle VanderKelen! We are thrilled to welcome them back to the gallery for this special, condensed presentation, which comprises aCinema’s Season 8.

Screenings will take place at 7 pm on Friday; 3 pm, 5 pm, and 7 pm on Saturday; and 5 pm and 7 pm on Sunday.

The first two screenings will feature 17 works selected from the aDifferent Program open call held this spring, which received nearly 200 submissions from around the globe. The weekend will then move into four additional curated screenings including works by Asako Ujita, Ayla Dmyterko, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Panu Johansson, Victoria Verseau, and more!

A beautiful accordion-fold program produced by Woodland Pattern and Split Fountain Press will be available for purchase in commemoration of this event. More information about this publication, and about the screenings, is forthcoming on our website.

Saturday July 20th, Full Program at 3PM:

Decanted Cyphers (TRT approx 52 min)

The Amber Gates, Laura Iancu, 4 min 00 sec

SYNOPSIS:

The Troite are protective totems placed at crossroads, water sprouts and in places of remembrance. They are the pillars of heaven and the mystical gateways of the Amber Mountains of Romania.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY:

Iancu is a visual artist working primarily in experimental video forms and immersive 3D animation & gaming, with an expanded practice of installation and photography. Originally from Romania, she has been teaching, and making images in the US for more a decade. Currently Laura is an assistant professor of film production at Virginia Tech, School of Performing Arts.

Thematically she works around issues of ecology, ethnography, civic resistance under oppressive regimes of power and forms of humor as subversion mechanisms for prescriptive discourses and representations. Her work originates from puzzling together all the hints of the world, the gestural intertextuality, the perceptive and surface qualities of objects, geographical mappings, aspects of sound art, poetry, magic realism, pop/internet culture, gardening, and the mutations of emerging moving image technologies, including the rise in Generative AI technologies.

Laura Iancu she/her/hers

ABURIDASHI Assortment: Video Letters written in invisible ink. / 映像 書簡あぶり出し·あそーと。, Nonoho Suzuki, 9 min 24 sec

SYNOPSIS:

This work is an experimental documentary animation by the traditional Japanese technique of "ABURIDASHI". And it's consists of three parts: Beginning, Middle, and End. "Beginning" is a personal video made to celebrate my friend Hiratake-san. "Middle" is about Hiratake-san's anger at the government responses to the Great East Japan earthquake.

"End" is about the fear of war in which get involved individuals.

This work depicts how my perspective changes from an individual to a nation over a period of 10 years.

[Director’s statement]

I am empty. I am nothing.

The only thing that floats in the void is the frustration of being alive.

I see the videos I made in the past.

Now, my daughters are a high school student and a junior high school student. However, in the video, it stops they are as an elementary school student and kindergarten student.

What am I?

At that time, I didn't know that there is a war going on in the future.

At that time, I didn't know that my mind become sick and empty in the future. In order to move forward now, the only thing I can do is to broil each papers one by one.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY:

Nonoho Suzuki was born in Tokyo 1980. Graduated the 26th class of Image Forum Institute of the Moving Image. He is the second son of Shirouyasu Suzuki who is a poet and a filmmaker and the husband of Yuri Muraoka who is a filmmaker and a poet. His works are Take the wind (2008), I, and LA TAKE and Wii ”Gypsum” (2009) and so on. Take the wind (2008) won the Excellence Awards at the Tokyo Video Festival 2009. A father of two daughters.

Billy Billy, Billy Palumbo, 6 min 15 sec

SYNOPSIS:

The myth of Billy the Kid echoes into and out of unknown oblivion.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY:

Billy Palumbo is an experimental filmmaker, programmer, and educator in Oklahoma City.

APPENDAGES, Weston Lyon, 6 min 39 sec

SYNOPSIS:

1937 marked the release of the first fully-animated feature film. Appendages is a study of the moment preceding this milestone, where rigid departments of film labor separated women from men. The production of cell animation in the early days of the American studio system is really a story of gender lines and both an invitation for women to partake in the filmmaking process and a prevention of them advancing professionally beyond entry-level departments. Appendages brings together this site of animation labor and the action of a Starfish character (pulled from The Walt Disney Studio’s 1937 short film, Hawaiian Holiday) reproducing photo-mechanically at an uncontrollable rate. The screen is eventually swarmed; the Starfish paralyzed in full gallop, perverted from the natural world but desperate to realign itself against the celerity of entertainment’s working hours.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY:

Weston Lyon is a filmmaker and photographer living in Los Angeles. His recent work deals with the history of animation, its popular styles and business models of production. His work has been in exhibition and screened at spaces like the Torrance Art Museum, Henry Art Gallery, Deslave, Human Resources, as well as film festivals in the US and abroad. He has produced and directed films including 40HANDS (2023), APPENDAGES (2023), CLEARWATER PROGRESS (2021), BIG WATER (2019), and THE NIGHT TAPES (2018). He received his MFA from ArtCenter College of Design in 2017 and now teaches part-time in the Visual Arts and Media Studies department of Pasadena City College.

The Stream XIII, Hiroya Sakurai, 5 min 21 sec

SYNOPSIS:

In my "The Stream series", I have expressed the transformation of landscapes as a result of the interactions between humans and nature.

In "The Stream XIII", the 13th in the series, I focused on how the landscape is transformed when the wind as a weather phenomenon streams through the fields and reed fields cultivated by humans.

For sound effects, I used the sound of a wind chime. A wind chime consists of a bell made of iron with a weight suspended by a string inside. When the wind blows, the weight rings inside by wind pressure.

I used the wind chime to perceive the invisible presence of wind as sound. And also we can perceive the invisible presence of wind as visualized wind ripples in the fields. I expressed the invisible scenery through sound and images.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY:

Hiroya Sakurai

Born in Yokohama, Japan.

Graduated from University of Tsukuba.

Sakurai’s work can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada and J.Paul Getty Trust. Sakurai was awarded at “35th Asolo Art Film Festival (2016)", Italy, "39th Tokyo Video Festival", "18th FILE 2017 ", São Paulo (2017) and "56th Ann Arbor Film Festival" (2018).

Exhibitions include "4th Sydney Biennale (1982),"62nd Melbourne International Film Festival"(2013),"58th San Francisco International Film Festival" (2015) and "24th Rhode Island International Film Festival"(2020)

Not so Kool’haas, Lisa Marie Schmitt, 9 min 34 sec

SYNOPSIS:

In April 1959, the Soviet satellite Sputnik ll entered the Earth’s atmosphere and burned up over the Caribbean Ocean. By that moment, the dead body of the street dog Laika had already orbited the Earth 2570 times. Since then, tons of rockets, spacecraft, and measuring instruments have been launched into space without any plan for what to do with them at the end of their lives. Not so Kool’haas interweaves the problem of space junk with ideas of contemporary urban planning, its etymological counterpart Junk Space, a term coined by Architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas during the early 2000s. Thereby, the film poses the question what attitude is so unifying behind modern architecture and the conquest of space.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY:

Lisa Marie Schmitt, (*1991 in Trier, Germany) studied Fine Arts at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar in Saarbrücken. After graduating in 2017 she attended a residency at Cité Internationale des Arts Paris funded by Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral. She was awarded several scholarships, such as the GLOBAL Stipendium by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe (2021) and a work stipend by the Stiftung Kunstfonds (2023). Her works have been recently presented at Kunstverein Ludwigshafen, Roam projects, Brücke-Museum Berlin, Galerie Bernau and Galeria Posibilă in Bucharest. Lisa Marie Schmitt lives and works between Berlin, Germany and Romania.

Midsummer, Masha Vlasova, 2 min 37 sec

SYNOPSIS:

Midsummer is a cyanotype, sun-printed film. The film was conceived during Juhannus, the celebration of the longest day of the year in Finland, when the sun doesn’t set for 24 hours. The light of the sun is both material and collaborator in creating this film-poem.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY:

Masha Vlasova is an award-winning experimental and non-fiction filmmaker. She studied art at the Cooper Union (BFA, 2012), Yale University (MFA, 2016), and is a recipient of the Fulbright Fellowship in Filmmaking (2012-2013). Vlasova has exhibited and screened her films at Ann Arbor Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Smack Mellon, Anthology Archives, Abrons Arts Center, the Border Project Gallery in New York City, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, and Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, among others. Her recent film “Un-Tidal” received two awards for “Original Concept” and “Best Celluloid Film” at Experimental Film Festival of East Anglia, UK. She teaches film production and experimental film at Oxford College of Emory University and lives in Atlanta, GA. She’s a MacDowell Fellow.

Reporting from the Ghost Cities of the Metaverse: Decentraland, SubNet, 5 min 22 sec

SYNOPSIS:

Reporting from the Ghost Cities of the Metaverse explores empty and ineffective metaverse platforms using video,

social media relational aesthetics, and live streaming performance/discussions. These artistic forms serve to

critique techno-feudalist fantasies by examining the siloing of creative possibility in real time using glitch

processing and dialectical argumentation in text and sound.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY:

Created in fall of 2021, Sub Net is an anonymous new media art project that explores the mirror stage of online

identity formation and challenges the promises, politics and power dynamics of technology & capitalism. They are

a dream who thought it was a person. Their body of work intersects and tangles topics ranging from the amplification

of the absurd within the metaverse; performative nostalgia baiting; and social media engagement as a site for

relational aesthetics. Their work resolves as video artworks, live streaming performances, abject game art and

interactive WebGL experiences.

The Ant Colony, Natasha Cantwell, 2 min 22 sec

SYNOPSIS:

In an inner-city park, buzzing with wildlife but hemmed in by elevated freeways, a game is being played out on an ornate abacus. Within this space of controlled chaos, where the insects have taken over but are constantly disturbed by park-goers, the game is a bridge between the natural world and the industrialised world, the hive mind and the individual. It’s uncertain whether the participants are working together to solve a complex equation or if they are in competition. Or perhaps there was only ever one player, trying to see both sides?

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY:

Spanning music videos, editorial photography and art projects, Natasha Cantwell’s work openly embraces awkwardness while drawing from the absurdity of human behaviour. Her hand-printed analogue photographs and 16mm experimental films have been exhibited worldwide, including at the U.S. festival Experiments In Cinema, and the European Media Art Festival and Stuttgart Filmwinter Festival For Expanded Media in Germany.

Cantwell holds a Bachelor of Graphic Design and a Postgraduate Diploma in Art and Design from AUT. She has guest lectured at Unitec and MIT in New Zealand and presented at Semi Permanent Design Conference in Australia as the senior photographer for Frankie Magazine.

As a film programmer, Cantwell has produced the Brunswick Underground Film Festival, the Auckland Underground Film Festival as well as events for Channels: The Australian Video Art Festival. Since 2018 she has curated archival and contemporary street photography for the Victorian Archives Centre Gallery. Working between New Zealand and Australia, she is currently based in Melbourne.

Host or Publisher Woodland Pattern Book Center