Artists' Television Access

USF Students Experimental Film Class

Fara — Sat, 12 May 2012 04:00:32 +0000

USF students present their films and videos from two Spring 2012 experimental film classes.

works by:Ben Ambrogi
Clement Bauer

Stephanie Bunting
Marshall F. Byrne
Matthew Ching

Sara Cortese

Natalie Eakin
Crystal Ferguson

Maggie Gaster
Sarah Hulsman
Feral Huntley
Priyanka Mehta

Vicki Mortati

Jared Nangle

David Owens

Daniella Ricci-Tam

Youxi Zeren

Joe Zolonski

The California Chronicles

Kelly Pendergrast — Fri, 11 May 2012 04:00:09 +0000

The California Chronicles is the true story of sublime nature writ large across the West, and writ small on the page. The concept is simple: since May, three friends—Bob Glass, Darryl Jones, and Eliot Rose—have been chronicling their journeys into California nature, both around the Bay Area and further afield, and keeping a blog with sketches, poems, and prose from these excursions. Instead of describing their experiences with nature in terms of numbers like latitudes, longitudes, miles hiked and elevation gained, Glass, Jones, and Rose distill them to images and poems. Their aim is to restore a spirit of discovery to an age where every inch of the terrain is mapped by GPS and guidebooks.

This show celebrates a year of chronicling with a retrospective of the trio’s favorite images, haiku, and stories. The California Chronicles have taken inspirations from magic lantern lectures that were produced by artists and writers like Walter McClintock and Laura Gilpin in the early twentieth century, which stirred romantic notions of the disappearing western frontier among urban Americans. Glass, Jones, and Rose present themselves as explorers returning from the far-off land of California; not the state of suburbs and malls that is familiar to many, but a green and granite country full of wonder.

This nod to the past is more than just nostalgia. Many of the state parks that were established throughout the last century to preserve stretches of the disappearing frontier are now threatened with closure due to California’s budget crisis. One goal of the California Chronicles is to help keep these threatened areas open by spreading the word and showcasing their wonders, just as the writings of John Muir and the photographs of William Henry Jackson sparked the creation of the first national parks. Toward that end, proceeds from the show will go to the Portola and Castle Rock Foundation, which aims to save two state parks in the Bay Area that have been a source of inspiration for The California Chronicles and for many others.

Colectivo Cinema Errante presents: “Brazilian voices of cinema”

Fara — Mon, 07 May 2012 04:00:48 +0000

O Cangaceiro [The Bandit of Brazil]

(Lima Barreto, 1953, 105 min)
Inspired by American westerns, this film narrates the times of the “cangaceiros” in the “sertão” (backcountry) in Northern Brazil. A group of bandits abduct a small town school teacher to ask for a ransom. But one of them falls in love and flees with her.

Filme inspirado nos Westerns Americanos, mas sem perder o jeitinho brasileiro, conta a história do cangaceiro Teodoro, que se apaixona pela professora raptada por sua gangue.

Fome [Hunger] (Carlos Vergara, 1972, 5 mins)
A Super-8 production made by renowned abstract artist Carlos Vergara early in his career.
Um filme em super 8 feito pelo renomado artista Carlos Vergara.

Brazilian voices of cinema

Brazil helped pioneer filmmaking in the Americas, screening its first film in Rio de Janeiro all the way back in 1897, and its first documentary in 1903. The approach for this series was to strike a balance between art house and commercial film and, by covering different eras, genres and styles, touch upon various cornerstones of Brazilian cinema. Silent film began in Brazil with Antônio Leal’s thriller “Os Estranguladores” (1906); followed by Humberto Mauro’s “Brasa Dormida” (1928) and “Ganga Bruta” (1933); Adalbert Kememy’s avant-garde “Sao Paulo: Sinfonia de una Metropoli” (1929); and Mario Peixoto’s avant-garde “Limite” (1930).

In the ‘40s Brazilian cinema became overrun by Hollywood films. Companhia Cinematografica de Veracruz, a replica of the American studio system, produced mostly melodramas – Lima Barreto’s “O Cangaçeiro” (1953) obtained critical and financial success. In the ‘60s a movement called Cinema Novo came to dominate for two decades. A move away from the Hollywood production style, it was led by intellectuals like Glauber Rocha — “Antonio das Mortes” (1969) — who sought to create a distinctly Brazilian mode of filmmaking. In 1967, Ozualdo Candeias’ “A Margem” gave birth to Cinema Marginal, that sought to represent the life of society’s forgotten people. “Cinema Novo was a movie a little individualistic,” said José Mojica Marins, a marginais on his own whose Zé do Caixão (Coffin Joe) horror b-movies would become cult classics.

The creation of Embrafilme, a government agency in charge of financing and distribution, allowed Brazilian cinema to flourish during the 1970s and ‘80s. Bruno Barreto’s “Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos” (1976) and Carlos Diegues’ “Bye Bye Brasil” (1980) belong to this period. Embrafilme’s dissolution in 1990 nearly stopped cinematic output in Brazil altogether. Still, figures like Walter Salles, Fernando Meirelles and Karim Ainouz — “Madame Satã” (2002) — were able to produce films despite the adversities.

We are accompanying the series with shorts by three emerging local voices: Carolina Moraes-Liu, Rita Piffer and Savana Vagueiro, along with shorts by renowned Brazilian filmmakers Jorge Furtado, Dennison Ramalho and Carlos Vergara. A lot of voices to choose from that leave the door open for a second installment next year. We hope you enjoy the programs.

—Colectivo Cinema Errante

Small Press Traffic: in consideration of community

Fara — Mon, 07 May 2012 01:00:09 +0000

“in conjunction with UCSC’s May 4-5 conference Emergent Communities in Contemporary Experimental Writing

integrations of community and creation with Ronaldo Wilson, Vanessa Place, Sueyeun Julliette Lee, Tisa Bryant Juliana Spahr, and Anna Moschovakis

ATA Art Auction FUNRaiser

Shae Green — Sat, 05 May 2012 02:30:21 +0000

Artist’s Television Access invites you to attend this year’s Art Auction FUNRaiser! More than 50 works will be available, including pieces by Chris Johanson, Martha Colburn, Scott Hewicker, and many more!

Images of the work available now!

Come for the art, stay for the refreshments! Live music by The Beehavers and a post-auction soul dance party!

Friday, May 4th
Silent auction: 6:30-8pm
Live auction: 8:30pm

Admission donation: $5-$20

OpenScreening

Fara — Fri, 04 May 2012 04:00:20 +0000

ATA’s openscreening is the only monthly open submissions screening in the Bay Area.Get your work out there! Get feedback! Or just come and take it all in! One hour of shorts are accepted monthly on an open revolving basis, anything goes with the screened work, and the refreshments are pretty good too. $5, FREE admission for contributing artists. Door:7:30pm Projector: 8pm

Not a filmmaker? Come and hang out with us anyway. Enjoy the atmosphere, the art, the movies, the people, the refreshments

Submissions: Label all tapes w/ name, contact, title and length. Mail to: Openscreening, 992 Valencia, SF, 94110 1-2 week advance submissions strongly recommended. If not. . . it is all good. Max length: 15 min. Formats: DVD, miniDV/DVcam, VHS, beta, 8mm and 16mm All genres.

More Info: contact
Programming@atasite.org

Fara — Thu, 03 May 2012 03:54:04 +0000

An evening of sound/film performances with:

Irwin Swirnoff

Jon Porras

Linda Scobie and John Davis

Ben Bracken and Paul Clipson

Irwin Swirnoff makes films, takes photos, writes creative non-fiction and gets inspiration from all kinds of music. His work wants to take you on faded daydreams filled with longing, desire, and lingering memories. He’s interested in capturing the wonder of the everyday, and remembering that our bodies might know a lot more than our minds.

Jon Porras is a Bay Area musician whose work focuses on combining open tuned guitar with effects and processing. With clear cut roots in Americana and West Coast guitar, his work ranges from sparse, finger-picked passages to densely layered walls of melancholic wash.

Linda Scobie is DIY filmmaker who works in 16mm. Her films have been shown in the Black Maria, Antimatter and Ann Arbor Film Festivals. Her latest piece “Sky Dogs” is a 20 minute paper animated voyage through the cosmos, with dogs.

John Davis is an Oakland artist working with moving images and sound, expanding their relationships through experimentation, chance, collaboration and improvisation. Current performance work investigates various sound and image delivery systems, their material bi-products, and the range of sensory possibilities that exists between them.

Ben Bracken Is a musician and artist living in Oakland, California, who explores possibilities of echo-relocation in sound-based art.

Paul Clipson is a San Francisco-based filmmaker who often collaborates with sound artists and musicians on live performances, films and installations.

Revelcade Presents: Revelcade Applause Night

Fara — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 04:00:39 +0000

Revelcade is a team of Bay Area filmmakers who genuinely love creating motion picture and are driven to break boundaries, challenge the status quo, embrace emerging technology, and to create fun, smart, and high-quality original content to share . tonight Revelcade, will showcase their award winning videos, Plus new works and Sneak peaks of others... Read more »

Nightmare City presents Not Free, Not Dead: The Psychedelic End

Fara — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 04:00:59 +0000

A touring program of recent San Francisco Bay Area shorts.

Nightmare City is pleased to announce the upcoming tour of Not Free, Not Dead: The Psychedelic End, a video program of recent Bay Area shorts.

Harkening back to the tripped out psychedelic lightshows of San Francisco’s 1960s counter culture as well as early Beat Generation experiments in stop motion animation, the artists included in Not Free, Not Dead pay homage to the Bay Area’s rich relationship with the moving image while simultaneously transcribing their fragmented technological experience onto these varied strategies and materials.

Ranging from narrative to music video to experimental – these mixed shorts are united by a visual vernacular specific to California. Cobbled together from internet search words, these kaleidoscopic fragments are informed equally by subculture, the Bay Area’s rich underground film and video history as well as Hollywood’s cult classics and formulaic genres.

These hazy dreamlike states are populated by rock-and-roll devil horns, hang-loose hands and smiley faces floating freely alongside processed clips appropriated from major motion pictures. The darker side, a bad trip, emerges as surreal worlds give way to surreal worlds in a narrative buddy film and a horror flick, twisted from the mirrored, rainbow static of California’s once frontier landscape.

Featuring recent work by Caitlin Denny, Gregory Kaplowitz, Jen Kirsten, Alex S. Lukas, Jessica Miller, Dan Olsen, Skye Thorstenson, Virtual Pubes, and Nightmare City.

ABOUT

Since the 1940s the existence of institutions in the San Francisco Bay dedicated to the screening, distribution, and discussion of alternative film and video art fostered an environment that facilitated and supported the thriving experimental scene. Not Free, Not Dead: The Psychedelic End explores the extension of this trajectory in which a new crop of video artists are claiming the San Francisco Bay Area’s video landscape. Their performative, processed, hyper-color, animated worlds of skewed, sometimes non-existent narrative are united by an aesthetic of trippiness, the values of punk cinema, and seemingly abject notions of form, notions that are disembodied by the camera, computer or projector’s consumption.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

Catlin Denny is an independent curator, writer and artist based in San Francisco. In 2009 she founded JstChillin.org, an online exhibition platform, with Parker Ito. Through videos, interactive works, installations, essays, and various fabricated ephemera, the site generated a sense of community that reflected JstChillin’s interest in collapsing the relationship between curatorial pursuit and artistic practice. Rhizome at The New Museum is currently undertaking a complete archival of the project. Denny recently spoke in a panel discussion on The Digital Museum at The Creator’s Project and has done projects at Xth Lyon Biennale, The Dependent Art Fair (New York), 319 Scholes (Brooklyn), Reference Gallery (Richmond), School 33 Art Center (Baltimore), Roots and Culture (Chicago), The LAB (SF), NOMA Gallery (SF) La Mama (NYC) and many other locations in the net. She currently is directing and choreographing an evening of interactive and performative installations referencing the negative reflexivity of “being-online”. Body Manipulations will occur in June 2012 at San Francisco’s The LAB located in The Mission. She graduated from California College of the Arts in 2009 with a BFA in Media Arts.

Gregory Kaplowitz uses the mediums of photography and video to create painterly abstractions that result in unique photographs, editioned prints, and installations. He graduated from the California College of the Arts in 2007 with a dual BFA in photography and graphic design. Since then, he has participated in group exhibitions in New York and the Bay Area; and in 2009, he collaborated with Inbred Hybrid Collective for a solo show at the Christopher Henry Gallery in New York. Gregory Kaplowitz has also had his videos screened in programs presented in Hamburg, Berlin, Montreal, Chicago, and San Francisco. Currently, Gregory Kaplowitz is in the process of co-curating the exhibition, The Body is Missing, which has also received a 2011 Alternative Exposure Grant.

Jen Kirsten is an Oakland, CA based film and video artist whose work is informed by the Bay Area’s punk and LGBT community. By juxtaposing different formats, such as 16mm and VHS, and using lo-fi editing techniques like rescanning, Kirsten playfully examines the layering of identity and socially prescribed gender roles, while creating formally striking works.

Alex S. Lukas has been active as an experimental musician and practicing sound & video artist since his teenage years, performing regularly and showing nationally and internationally. Alex attended the MFA program of the California College of the Arts in Media Arts and holds a BFA in Film / Video / Performance. His video work focuses on temporal manipulation and illusion, predominately on analog formats.

Jessica Miller is an artist and designer living in San Francisco. Much of her work revolves around the subconscious symbology of color and form, and how those visual cues operate within social structures and cultural tropes. She received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2008, graduating with both the Toby Devan Lewis Award and the Cadogan Award. She held the 3 x 3 Residency at the Exploratorium, and has exhibited at The San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art, the San Francisco Arts Commission, Intersection for the Arts, SomArts gallery, and other Bay Area arts institutions. She currently works as Design Manager at Pivotal Labs, a software development agency where she specializes in Interaction Design for web and mobile applications. Her design work has been recognized at SXSW, where she was part of a team that won the Best in Mobile award in 2010.

Dan Olsen is the founding member of the ILuvMaryHartman YOUTUBE CHANNEL Fan Club. His collages, drawings and videos pull, twist and distort the pop cultural visual landscape. He has shown at S.H.E.D. Projects, The LAB, Shelf Gallery, Chop Chop Gallery, and The Toledo Art Museum, and his work will be on view at Adobe Books Backroom Gallery in the show 4 Dimensional Hollywood, opening March 31 2012.

Skye Thorstenson is an interdisciplinary artist who moonlights as a music video director, notably directing the video for Myles Cooper’s “Gonna Find Boyfriends Today”. He has exhibited at several galleries including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, David Cunningham Projects, Fringe Exhibitions, and Current Gallery. He co-curated Channel Drift, a program of animated shorts in The San Francisco International Animation Festival and was recently awarded a grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Virtual Pubes is guided by the delirious visions of Eric Svedas and Sam Wohl. Svedas and Whol both grew up in Southern California and share an interest the behind-the-scenes gritty, grimy magic of fabrication and special effects in big budget movie production. Their collaborative endeavors explore the space in which fine art, performance, video and entertainment meet while dispersing authorship by expanding their collaborative net. They often work with Sarah Bernat, producer extraordinaire,Josh Self, cinematographer and filmmaker, and Rob Spector, accomplished musician and front man of Bronze.

Cantaloupe Creek by Jennifer Louise Mellenbruch

Shae Green — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 03:00:43 +0000

In ATA Gallery:

Cantaloupe Creek
Jennifer Louise Mellenbruch

Join us on Wednesday, April 25th, 7pm-10:30pm for a reception for the artist.

Special musical performance by Bugs In Costume, featuring Maya Prickett!

*The work can also be viewed before ATA screenings, beginning April 15th*

“Cantaloupe Creek is my name for the enchanted world of my imagination. It’s a lush exotic terrain full of fairies and other-worldly creatures. By combining assemblage and floristry/horticulture mediums, I’ve manifest that dream scape into our reality. Through the use of re-purposed everyday items and familiar woodland imagery, this world has an eery similarity to ours. Thereby, inviting the notion that we could catch glimpses of it if we could shake off the rational perceptions which veil our modern eyes.
The pieces are alive. They contain plants and flowers which require upkeep such as watering and pruning. This interaction alters the viewers passive role into an active participant who enters this fairy world and has the power to alter it By blending the boundaries of form, function, and fantasy, these works belie the “do not tough the art” adage. Indeed touching is crucial to their survival.”