Screening Room: CINÉ PLUTO presents ‘Cabeza de Vaca’ and Old West Shorts

CINÉ PLUTO, a microcinema created by parents of artist Avery Singer, Greg Singer and Janet Kusmierski, first launched as an invite-only experience in the artist couple’s downtown New York City loft in 1998.
Kicking off a unique new quarterly film series at Hauser & Wirth 18th Street, the long-standing salon-style series will make its public debut with an evening of films dedicated to the American Old West.
The evening will include Nicolás Echevarría’s feature ‘Cabeza de Vaca’ along with an assemblage of short films screened on vintage View-Master, 16mm and Super 8 projectors.
CINÉ PLUTO presents
‘Cabeza de Vaca’ and Old West Shorts
VIEW-MASTER REELS
The Grand Canyon, Arizona
Mesa Verde, Colorado
Monument Valley, Utah
American Indians of the Southwest
Riders of the Desert American Indian series
16MM FILM
Representation of the Hopi peoples
SUPER8 HOME MOVIE
Native American Dance Parade in Arizona
FEATURE FILM
CABEZA DE VACA (1990)
Directed by Nicolás Echevarría
1 hr 51 min
With musical recordings by
R. Carlos Nakai
Robby Robertson
Buffy Sainte-Marie
Music of New Mexico, Smithsonian/Folkways
And an audio presentation of
Lord Buckley’s night club act ‘The Gasser’
Special thanks to Calder Singer for his contributions and ideas.Attending
CINÉ PLUTO is free and open to the public; however, due to limited space, reservations are required.
About Greg Singer
Artist and former projectionist at The Museum of Modern Art, Greg Singer, has been running CINÉ PLUTO out of his New York City loft since 1998. The salon style themed programing for an invited audience seats 9 to 12 guests. Past screenings have included feature films, shorts, home movies, industrials, 35mm slides, projection film/slides, Standard 8mm, Super 8mm, 16mm, 35mm slides, ViewMaster, Projection Video, VHS, Video 8, Blu-Ray, iPhone, iPad, Audio playback, LP, CD and cassette. CINÉ PLUTO…sheds light and joy. Singer has been painting since the late 1960s and has received his MFA from Yale University. He has shown widely throughout New York City.

About Janet Kusmierski
Janet Kusmierski’s work is intuitive in figuration, color abstraction and happenstance. She has been painting for 50 years with occasional digital experiments in stop-motion or hand-drawn animations. Currently, she has been drawing digitally on an iPad Pro as her sketchbook. These works evolve into paintings, paper prints, or time-lapsed/time-based animated abstract faces (viewed on an iPad screen, monitors or through a projector). Since 2023, she has focused solely on time-lapse abstract faces. The drawings are projected as an installation. Janet and Greg often collaborate with their son Calder Singer who is an accomplished musician and composer.
About Avery Singer
Avery Singer (b. 1987) was born and raised in New York NY. Her parents, the artists Janet Kusmierski and Greg Singer, named her after Milton Avery. Growing up in a creative community, Singer experimented with photography, film and drawing, but in those years never considered working with paint. In 2008, Singer studied at the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, and in 2010, she received her B.F.A. from Cooper Union, New York NY. During her studies, Singer engaged in performance art, video making, as well as sculpture utilizing carpentry, metal casting and welding. After graduation, she discovered her chosen art form from an unanticipated experiment with SketchUp, a program used by her peers to design exhibition spaces, and airbrushed a black-and-white painting based on a digital illustration. Since then, Singer has employed the binary language of computer programs and industrial materials in order to remove the trace of the artist’s hand while engaging the tradition of painting and the legacy of modernism.
Photo: Courtesy of Ciné Pluto. Designed by Janet Kusmierski

Host or Publisher Hauser & Wirth New York