Artists' Television Access

ATA LIVES! 30 YEARS OF RADICAL SAN FRANCISCO FILM AND VIDEO THIS SEPTEMBER

ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS (ATA) CELEBRATES 30 YEARS OF RADICAL SAN FRANCISCO FILM AND VIDEO THIS SEPTEMBER

ATA LIVES! is a season-long festival of screenings, performances, events, parties and more Watch the ATA Lives! video documentary

September 4-26, 2014 at Artists’ Television Access 992 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA 94110

ATA on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ATAconnect

Video: Mission Eye & Ear Other Cinema George Kuchar at the 2012 Whitney Biennial

San Francisco, CA, August 4, 2014 – This September, Artists’ Television Access (ATA) celebrates its 30thanniversary as a bastion of San Francisco Bay Area independent and experimental film and video, and its ongoing commitment as a community space for the exchange of non-conformist ideas, with ATA Lives!, a series of screenings, events, parties, performances and more. Anniversary programming begins Thursday, September 4 with a screening of past and present staff works, and continues on the afternoon of Friday, September 5 with a 30-hour Marathon Screening and benefit, curated by Bay Area artist Gilbert Guerrero, that culminates in a party on Saturday September 6, with a rotating cast of VJs screening works from ATA’s archive. ATA co-founder Marshall Weber returns to San Francisco to screen his seminal 1985 video workFlatlands on Friday, September 5 as the marathon’s evening feature. ATA collaborator and co-founder Craig Baldwin presents an anniversary edition of his storied Other Cinema series on Saturday September 13, with works by Sylvia Schedelbauer, Bryan Boyce and James T. Hong; and Baldwin’s own works are screened in a double feature on Friday, September 19 with a program of shorts followed by his feature film Sonic Outlaws(1995). ATA’s live cinema series Mission Eye & Ear concludes its 2014 edition on Friday September 12, featuring world premieres of new collaborative film and music works by Janis Crystal Lipzin and Lisa Mezzacappa; Zachary Watkins and Rosario Sotelo; and Isabelle Harada and Crystal Pascucci, performed live in ATA’s theater. GAZE, ATA’s ongoing series of work by women media artists, presents GAZE:30, a retrospective of women’s film and video from the 1980s to the present, on Wednesday, September 24. September’s programming concludes with two evenings dedicated to the work of San Francisco’s hugely influential filmmaker brothers Mike and George Kuchar, on Thursday and Friday September 25 and 26.ATA’s anniversary programs reflect on the organization’s wild and prolific history, and broadcast its mission of access, radical art-making and independent, noncommercial culture to both traditional residents and newcomers to its Mission District neighborhood. Anniversary programs continue through November 2014, with more programs announced this fall on the ATA website, www.atasite.org. All events are located at ATA, 992 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA 94110. Tickets for all events are $7-10 sliding scale, $10 for the anniversary party on September 6, available at the door starting 30 minutes before showtime. For more information visit www.atasite.org or call (415) 824-3890.

ATA’s anniversary celebrations begin with a 30-hour Marathon Screening and fundraiser, beginning at 1pm on Friday September 5 and concluding at 7pm on Saturday September 6. The event, organized by Bay Area artist and curator Gilbert Guerrero, continues ATA’s long tradition of extreme performance and endurance art. The program will draw from ATA’s lengthy, diverse roster of independent filmmakers and video artists, friends and collaborators. Guest curators will include Craig Baldwin, Molly Hankwitz, Karla Milosevich, Lucy Thane, Kathleen Quillian, and others. Audience members will be able to solicit friends, family and co-workers to sponsor each hour they watch of the marathon, with all proceeds supporting ATA. ATA volunteers will also offer early morning pancakes and free, unlimited coffee refills. (Note: there will be a brief intermission at 4am on Saturday, September 6.)

ATA welcomes back co-founder Marshall Weber to San Francisco, to screen his epic stereo video pieceFlatlands (1985, 1:40) as the screening marathon’s Friday evening feature (Friday September 5, 8pm). Flatlands is two channels of VHS video and four audio tracks played simultaneously, metaphorically reproducing the dichotomies of the right and left brain hemispheres, and the internal thoughts and external environments of the leading protagonist, Boyd Sayjack. Part psychedelic documentary and part psychodrama, Flatlands was produced in San Francisco, and features the last major acting appearance of Pope Ondine, one of Andy Warhol’s primary film ensemble ‘Superstars’ in the sixties and seventies.

Craig Baldwin, ATA co-founder and organizer of the Other Cinema series of experimental and underground film and performance since 1978, hosts a special anniversary iteration of the famous weekly series (Saturday, September 13, 8pm), showcasing the work of three members of the 992 collective –Bryan Boyce (San Francisco), James T. Hong (Taipei), and Sylvia Schedelbauer (Berlin). Baldwin’s own celebrated and influential work, exploiting found and archival footage embedded in countercultural sensibilities, is featured in a double feature (Friday September 19) of shorts (7pm), including ¡O No Coronado! (1992), a “shlockumentary” retelling of the invasion of the American southwest in the mid-16th century; plus his feature film Sonic Outlaws (1995), which documents the band Negativland’s controversial copyright infringement troubles (9pm).http://www.othercinema.com

September brings this year’s final installment of Mission Eye & Ear (Friday, September 12, 8pm), a live cinema series that connects Bay Area composers and improvisers with filmmakers and video artists drawn from ATA’s diverse and geographically sprawling family, to create new works performed live at ATA by an ensemble of local musicians. Composer-performers Lisa Mezzacappa, Crystal Pascucci and Zachary James Watkinsrepresent a rich cross-section of the local creative music scene, influenced by electronic music, acoustic improv, noise, avant-garde jazz, alt-rock and theatrical musical traditions of Asia. Filmmaker/media artistsJanis Crystal Lipzin, Isabelle Harada and Rosario Sotelo explore cultural identity, political commentary, dreamlike cinescapes and formal abstraction in a wide range of narrative and experimental works. Mission Eye & Ear is organized by Bay Area musician and curator Lisa Mezzacappa, with ATA.http://www.missioneyeear.com

GAZE, ATA’s film series dedicated to screening independent film and video by women, presents a special anniversary edition, GAZE:30 (Wednesday, September 24, 8pm). The program surveys 30 years of film and video by women, from the 1980s to the present, revisiting favorite artists and introducing lesser-known emerging talents, with the series’ signature expansiveness, including work that is surreal, experimental, political, abstract, narrative, personal, and documentary. The GAZE curators, who collaborate with the ATA programming team, is comprised of practicing Bay Area-affiliated women media artists and curators: Mallary Abel, Brenda Contreras, Kelly Pendergrast, Nadia Shihab and Tessa Siddle.http://gazefilmseries.wordpress.com/

Over two nights (Thursday September 25 and Friday September 26, 8pm), ATA celebrates the life and works of the hugely influential filmmaker brothers George Kuchar (1942-2011) and Mike Kuchar. Curated by Mike Kuchar with ATA, the two programs will showcase work by each brother, as well as collaborative projects created in their early years in New York in the 1960s and in the decades they lived, worked and taught in San Francisco. Night one will focus on new and recent works by Mike Kuchar; night two on George Kuchar’sWeather Diaries (1986-2011), the series he created over 25 years in his travels as a “storm squatter” observing and documenting tornados in the midwest. Called “legends in the world of experimental film” by Roger Ebert, the Kuchars are titans of low-budget camp, and have been acknowledged as an influence on the works of John Waters, Todd Solondz, Pedro Almodovar, and Atom Egoyan.

Key Artist Bios

Craig Baldwin is a filmmaker and curator whose interests lie in archival retrieval and recombinatory forms of cinema, performance and installation. He is the recipient of several grants, including those from the Rockefeller Foundation, Alpert Award, Creative Capital, Phelan, AFI, FAF, and California Arts Council. Over the last two decades, his productions have been shown and awarded at numerous international festivals, museums, and institutes of contemporary art, often in conjunction with panels, juries, and workshops on collage and cultural activism. His own weekly screening project, Other Cinema, has continued to premiere experimental, essay, and documentary works for over a quarter century, recently expanding into DVD publishing.

The twin brothers and longtime Bay Area residents George Kuchar (1942-2011) and Mike Kuchar (1942- ) began making 8mm films as teenagers in the 1950s in the Bronx, NY. They became central figures in the NYC underground film scene of the 1960s, screening work alongside Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, and Jack Smith. Mike and George Kuchar were the co-recipients of United States Artist Rockefeller Fellowship Award (2006), the Vanguard Director Award at the 11th CineVegas Film Festival, and FRAMELINE Lifetime Achievement Award at San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival (2009). The brothers taught for decades at the San Francisco Art Institute. In addition to dozens of their own films, the Kuchars directed more than 15 films together, and in 1997, collaborated on a book, Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool, a memoir discussing four decades of filmmaking.

Marshall Weber is a conceptual interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. He has significant bodies of work in the media of artists’ books, collage, drawing, printing, video, and public endurance performances. He has curated hundreds of exhibitions around the world since the 1980s and is known for his outspoken advocacy for artists and cultural organizations that work outside of the conventional academic and commercial art world. Weber is represented by Munch Gallery, New York, and by the Booklyn Artists Alliance. Weber received his MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1981, and went on to co-found Artists Television Access, one of the longest-running alternative media art centers in the US. Weber has been an Interdisciplinary Arts Fellow of both the New York Foundation for the Arts and the McKnight Foundation, and has received grants from the National Endowment for theArts and Art Matters.

About Artists’ Television Access

Artists’ Television Access is a San Francisco-based, artist-run, non-profit organization that cultivates and promotes culturally-aware, underground media and experimental art. We provide an accessible screening venue and gallery for the presentation of programmed and guest-curated screenings, exhibitions, performances, workshops and events. We believe in fostering a supportive community for the exhibition of innovative art and the exchange of non-conformist ideas.

ATA was established by artists John Martin and Marshall Weber in 1984 as a performance art space, screening venue and gallery, and included an affordable video production facility located on 8th Street in San Francisco’s South of Market district. It was one of the first organizations in San Francisco to consistently promote the work of video artists. Although ATA later expanded its scope and mission, ATA began as a television production facility where the public could create their own content for broadcast (at highly discounted rates) on Artists’ Television (ATV), ATA’s local cable television program. Other artists associated with the early days of ATA include Craig Baldwin, Lise Swenson, Phil Patiris, Eva Koenig, Rigo 23, Fred Rinne, Scott Williams and Dale Hoyt. After a fire on Halloween night 1986 burned down the space, ATA moved to 992 Valencia Street where it has operated a storefront gallery and screening room since 1987.

ATA and its programs are supported by Grants for the Arts, San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, City of San Francisco Voluntary Arts Contribution Fund, the Tarbell Family Foundation, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, generous individual donors and matching gifts from Apple, Genentech and the Walter and Elise Haas Fund.

 


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