Author: Fara

There are overlaps, symmetries, and echoes in the ways these makers engage  corporeality, viscerality, and mortality as material.

Every flower has (2016), 6minutes 20 seconds   dir: Sindhu Thirumalaisamy
Razor’s Edge (2016), 3 minutes 25 seconds    dir: Stefani Byrd
Evidence (2014), 4 minutes    dir: Abigail Severance and Julie Tolentino
Winterkill (2016), 5 minutes   dir: Abigail Severance
Molt (2016), 2 minutes    dir: Heidi Kayser
Loveseat (2017), 3 min 15 sec   dir: Lyndsay Bloom
The Destruction of Royal Gardens (2017), 5 minutes   dir: Hermione Spriggs and Curtis Tamm
Wolf Release (work-in-progress)  6 minutes  Bill Basquin
Goats With Westin and Tyson (2016) 12 minutes    dir: Angie Jennings

Organized by Bill Basquin.

Abigail Severance https://www.abigailseverance.com/
Abigail Severance’s films consider memory, the body and the powerful act of witnessing. She works in a broad range of cinematic forms from fiction to formal experimentation and essay, crafting a body of work that comprises an ongoing excavation of nostalgia both as addiction and as inspiration.

Angie Jennings  http://angelajennings.net/home.html#_=_

Bill Basquin http://www.billbasquin.info/
Bill Basquin’s practice takes as its root his relationship with those around him and the changes that can occur in meaningful partnership over extended periods of time and with careful observation and interaction. The interventions he makes as an individual – sculptures, films and writing – are magnified and altered by the continuing actions of the communities that he monitors.

Curtis Tamm http://curtistamm.net/ Curtis James Tamm is from California.

Heidi Kayser http://www.heidikayserart.com/
Heidi Kayser works across performance, sculpture, costume, video, photo and drawing. Kayser premiered twelve new sculptural garments from her Lamplight Collection in a runway show at CUSP Showcase at the House of Blues in San Diego in February 2017.

Hermione Spriggs http://hermione-spriggs.com/
Hermione Spriggs is an artist and writer based in London. Spriggs’ background in Anthropology and training in ethnographic film continues to influence her time-invested approach to site specific work. Whilst often engaging in collaboration with other artists and specialists external to the art world, her own research is dedicated to articulating and propagating a practice-based field known as The Anthropology of Other Animals (“AoOA”).

Julie Tolentino http://www.julietolentino.com
 Tolentino creates intimate solo movement-based installations including time-based durational performances, sculptural endurance events and audio soundscapes. She was original founder and creator of the long-running NYC Clit Club (1990-2002) as well as a host of early 90’s queer performance weeklies. She leads customized one-to-one and small group workshops and offers artist residencies at her off-grid site: FERAL HOUSE & STUDIO in Joshua Tree, California.

Lyndsay Bloom  http://lyndsaybloom.com/
Lyndsay Ellis Bloom (b. Florida, USA) is a filmmaker and artist working in experimental cinema and film installation. Her eclectic experiences include assisting filmmakers Babette Mangolte and Jennifer Reeves, building dioramas for the Climate Change exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and working on the Research Vessel Roger Revelle as an oceanographic researcher for Scripps on a 25-day expedition from Taiwan to Palau. Bloom lives and works in California.

Sindhu Thirumalaisamy http://xindhu.weebly.com/
Following the ways in which sound challenges scopic regimes, Sindhu’s work engages a poetics of uncontainability across different sites, cultures, and borders. She often works with other artists and activists, taking on roles of researcher, recordist, editor, and performer. Sindhu was born in India and is currently an MFA student at the University of California, San Diego.

Stefani Byrd http://www.stefanibyrd.com/bio/
Byrd’s art practice includes video, new media, and interactive technologies.  She is noted for her interactive temporary public art installations that create “empathy training” experiences for the audience. These works are a hybrid of video and performance art that both disorient and re-orient the viewer; in both playful and sophisticated ways, her work draws the viewer into active and often interactive engagement.

The Fall of the I-Hotel (Curtis Choy, 1983) 58 minutes, color
On August 4, 1977, thousands of people surrounded the International Hotel at Kearny and Jackson Streets, taking a last stand against powerful real estate interests to try and prevent the displacement of a thriving community. The Fall of the I-Hotel documents the culmination of a decade-long battle to save the International Hotel, whose residents, mostly Filipino and Chinese seniors, struggled to save their homes, aided by extensive support from community groups, activists, and residents citywide.

Filmmaker Curtis Choy beautifully lays out the history and way of life of the elders living in the hotel through interviews and archival photographs, then guides a vérité immersion in the protests themselves. The nighttime cinematography in particular is extraordinarily
rich on the 16mm print we’ll be showing. The film’s depictions of evictions, police/protestor face-offs, and the forced transformation of a neighborhood make The Fall of the I-Hotel as relevant as ever today.

preceded by

Chinatown: Portrait of a Working Community (Alan Ohashi, 1978) 14 minutes, color
This production of the Association of Chinese Teachers looks beyond the neon and gift shops of San Francisco’s densest neighborhood to examine what life is like for its inhabitants. A musical score by Dan Kuramoto of the jazz group Hiroshima and cinematography by Curtis Choy help it rise above standard didactics. Choy’s footage of International Hotel protests gives an early glimpse of the topic he’d grant greater depth in The Fall of the I- Hotel.
and
Sewing Woman (Arthur Dong, 1982) 14 minutes, b/w
On the surface this is a straightforward account of the life story of one of the many women working in Chinatown garment factories 35 years ago. A narration delivered over images of her workspace as well as an array of archival photographs tells us the alternately harrowing and heartwarming details of her life growing up in pre-Communist China, her arranged marriage into a “Gold Mountain family” and subsequent emigration to San Francisco. But the final moments of this Oscar- nominated short made by a San Francisco State University student (who’d later go on to create many documentaries & the book Forbidden City, USA) raise more questions than answers about this woman’s life.