Artists' Television Access

David Finkelstein and Dolissa Medina: New experimental shorts

Sunday, November 15, 2015, 7:30 pm, $7-$10

witchNew York artist Finkelstein teams up with local artist Medina to present surreal narratives of landscapes, both external and internal.

Privy (2014)
A young woman is forced to live with an unsympathetic stepmother, and spends much of her time in an outhouse, escaping into books and her own vivid fantasy life. “Privy” uses oblique, poetic language, fanciful images and musical interludes to depict her daydreams and her evolving plans for escape. Based on an improvisation by actors David Finkelstein and Ian W. Hill.
The Crow Furnace (Dolissa Medina, 2015)
“The Crow Furnace” is a narrative poem-essay about San Francisco, urban displacement, and the spectacle of loss. Two protagonists journey through a purgatorial time and place, encountering sights and objects from the city’s history of catastrophic fires – a metaphor for the disappearance of communities.
The Linen Closet (David Finkelstein, 2015)
An older woman (Alice Teirstein) opens a closet door and finds a key to her confused, fading memories. Hearing and vision loss isolate her, and her mental confusion keeps her suspended in the tactile sensations of the immediate present. The touch of old linen brings back old family history, both pleasant and traumatic. Based on an improvised dialog by David Finkelstein and Ian W. Hill, “The Linen Closet” blends animation, music, dance, and performance to create a poetic portrait of the inner world of a woman struggling to make sense of the present and find peace with the past.

A poet’s journey though corridors of liquid geometry where words float and echoes are visual; where portals open onto morphing gardens with unlimited horizons.
-Mike Kuchar on David Finkelstein’s “Suggestive Gestures”

DAVID FINKELSTEIN’s video work has been featured in numerous film festivals around the world and has won awards at thirteen of them. In 2013, he was an invited artist at the Traverse Vidéo Festival in Toulouse, France. His first feature film premiered at New Filmmakers in New York. He has had solo screenings of his films in New York, Chicago, Portland, Austin, North Carolina, Minnesota, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. His work has been funded by The Fund for Creative Communities, The Field, Movement Research, Meet the Composer, The Brooklyn Arts Exchange, BACA, and other sources.
DOLISSA MEDINA is the creator of more than a dozen short films. Over the past 15 years she has screened her work at festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, San Francisco International Film Festival, MIX New York, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Int’l Short Film Festival Oberhausen. She has also exhibited at museums and galleries in Toronto, Mexico City, New York and Oakland, as well as at site-specific outdoor venues such as the side of fire station for San Francisco’s 1906 Earthquake Centennial. Medina is interested in the mythic dimensions of history and explores this theme in her found footage films about cities and place. A former Fulbright Scholar, she holds a B.A. in journalism from San Francisco State University and an MFA in Visual Arts from UC-San Diego.

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