Author: Fara

This collection of shorts revolve around the thematics of longing, loss and the desire for another way of being. Through tropes of fantasy and science-fiction, often drawing attention to musical, aural and animated elements, the selected group of films and videos probes the poles of utopia and dystopia, revisits pasts lost, imagines futures found, and suggests temporal and spatial instability.

THE FILMS:

Hope/Alone, 2010 Christine Negus (1:30 mins)

we can’t see their shape from this far away, but we can hear them, 2009 Christine Negus (3 mins)

 Dogs in Space, 2008, Kristin Anchor (4 mins)

I Can’t Feel My Face, 2011, Chris Naka (6 mins)

Myth of My Ancestors, 2008, Latham Zearfoss (4 mins)

Myth of My Ancestors (A Re/Creation Fable) is a short experimental video combining live action, animation, and an a cappella cover of The Cocteau Twins song, Carolyn’s Fingers, to revision the garden of Eden as a queer utopia.

 If Their Be Thorns, 2012, Michael Robinson (13 mins)

A dark wave of exile, incest, and magic burns across the tropics, forging a knotted trail into the black hole. Three star-crossed siblings wander in search of one another as a storm of purple prose and easy listening slowly engulfs them.

Godass (Music Video for Alabaster Choad), 2013, Lark Buckingham (3 mins)

The Year I Broke My Voice, 2012, Madsen Minax (47 mins)

The Year I Broke My Voice is a video project built from  interpretations and reenactments of three coming of age films: The Outsiders (1983), Stand By Me (1986), and The Year My Voice

Broke (1987), that re-approaches the master narrative of childhood’s transition into adulthood. This work positions a group of age and gender ambiguous characters in a vacant and post-industrial

landscape, in which they must forge relationships amongst one another. Misadventures such as cheating card games, attempts at hypnotism, haircuts by the blade of a pocket knife, and nighttime

spooning allow the characters to attempt knowing one another.

Robert Kocik’s cutting-edge work blurs the distinction between art, architecture, and healing. He has studied poetry at the New College in San Francisco and engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique IBOIS in Lausanne, Switzerland. After apprenticing with Japanese woodworkers in the San Francisco Bay Area, under the tutelage of Makoto Imai, and working with the Compagnons du Devoir, a traditional French wood-framers guild, Kocik began fusing these two traditions in his own work, beginning with furniture, and gradually evolving into architecture and sculpture.

He has been commissioned to design buildings for several well-known artists, including internationally acclaimed sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard and prestigious art critic David Levi-Strauss. As an architect in the public sphere, he works toward the realization of “missing civic services,” conceptualizing, designing, and constructing buildings that serve a public function and provide an activity that in some way “turns the world around.” Examples of past missing civic services include Preemptive Peace Place, Enfranchisement Ranch, and Furniture While You Wait. Kocik has exhibited related sculptural work at P.S. 122, Hunter College Gallery, the Kentler International Drawing Space, and the Makor Gallery, all in New York, among many other venues. His work is currently on view at the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan.

Kocik is also an acclaimed poet whose books include Over Coming Fitness (Autonomedia, 2000) Rhrurbarb (Ecopoetics, 2007) and the forthcoming The Prosodic Body (The Factory School, 2009). His poetry and writings have appeared in the journals Acts, Object, Crayon, Action Poetique, The New Coast, and Ecopoetics, among many others. He has also translated and published the work of several contemporary French poets.

In 1990, Kocik co-founded the Atelier Trigon, a multidisciplinary arts, trades, and performance space in Paris with choreographer Daria Faïn, where he served as Co-Artistic Director from 1990-94. In 1997 he founded the Bureau Of Material Behaviors, a materials research, consultation, design, and building practice located in Brooklyn, NY. Kocik has taught and lectured extensively throughout the United States.