Author: Fara

You shall possess the good of the earth and sun . . . . there are millions of suns left,

You shall no longer take things at second and third hand . . . . nor look through the eyes of the dead . . . . nor feed on the specters in books,

You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.

—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

Minong, I slept. Vera Brunner Sung. Color 16mm silent film. 5 minutes. 2010.

On the remote wilderness island called Minong (Isle Royale), remains of human industry are absorbed into the forest and shoreline. An inquiry into the push and pull between people and nature, land and sea, intimacy and vastness.

Piensa en Mi. Alexandra Cuesta. Color 16mm sound film. 15 minutes. 2009.

Moving from east to west and back, the windows of a bus frame fleeting sections of urban landscape. Throughout the day, images of riders, textures of light and fragments of bodies in space come together to weave a portrait in motion; a contemplative journey of public transport in the city of Los Angeles. Isolation, routine and everyday splendor, create the backdrop of this journey, while the intermittent sounds of cars construct the soundscape. Daily travel is captured in the details.

OPENING. Madison Brookshire. Color 16mm film, sound and silent with live music. 25 minutes. 2007.

Music performed by Ezra Buchla, Laura Steenberge and Tashi Wada.

OPENING reveals the city in the landscape and the landscape in the city. The images come from in-between spaces, such as off-ramps and back alleys. Instead of stitching these unlike things together, the cuts create space and emphasize distance. Three musicians playing very clear, quiet, long tones accompany the film. The indeterminacy of the music provides a stark contrast to the fixed nature of the film print.

— Intermission —

Merciful Men. Ben Rodkin. Black and white digitized super-16mm with stereo sound. 11 minutes. 2011.

Mexican migrant farm workers in California’s Great Central Valley are followed on a summer day in 115-degree heat. The work is addressed as purely physical, human bodies moving against resistance.  Rhythms in labor, in interaction, in landscape, in weather, in the sounds of the place, in the individual beats that comprise a workday from restful moments as the day begins, to the listless off-work hours in the evening.

TARP. Zach Iannazzi. Black and white 16mm silent film. 3 minutes. 2011.

Light trails of the golden west.

CASTAIC LAKE. Brigid McCaffrey. Color 16mm sound film. 28½ minutes. 2010.

Taking its course, the camera drifts in to the coves and surveys the shorelines of a multi-use reservoir to unearth fragments of its young history and consider a series of possible relationships within this artificial environment.

Biographies

Madison Brookshire is a Los Angeles-based artist whose interdisciplinary work investigates modes of perception and qualities of time. His films and videos have screened internationally and he has had solo exhibitions at Parker Jones in Los Angeles and Presents Gallery in Brooklyn. In 2008-9 he was an artist in residence at the Hammer Museum.

Vera Brunner-Sung is a Los Angeles-based non-fiction filmmaker interested in the way personal and social history is channeled through landscape and the built environment. In addition to making moving image work, she writes film criticism and is a lecturer at the University of California, San Diego.

Alexandra Cuesta is a filmmaker and photographer who lives and works between Los Angeles and Quito, Ecuador. Her work is about the construction of place, structures of time and documentation of the invisible, discerning the in-between within the outside and the familiar. She was recently included in 25 Filmmakers for the 21st Century in Film Comment’s Avant-Garde Poll and received a Map of Time Jury Award at the 48th Ann Arbor Film Festival.

Zach Iannazzi is a San Francisco-based filmmaker. “My gaze is clear. A wide-eyed child-like wonder at the variety of nature, wedged into a pyramidal ray of light.”

Brigid McCaffrey makes documentary films about subjects who appear to be mis/displaced in the world and the mutable landscapes they encounter. Featuring Sikhs in the California desert, young female truck drivers on the American interstate, and nuns as riverboat captains, her films have been seen as far afield as Rotterdam, Portland, Lisbon, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. She is currently working with an itinerant geologist speculating on survivalist living in the Mojave region.

Ben Rodkin is a filmmaker living and working in Los Angeles. His work has shown extensively in the US and internationally. He is originally from Oakland, CA.

programmed by Madison Brookshire, special thanks to Zach Iannazzi

New film/video + music collaborations by:
PAUL CLIPSON + DARREN JOHNSTON

KERRY LAITALA + AARON NOVIK

KONRAD STEINER + MATT INGALLS

… performed LIVE!

SAN FRANCISCO – Artists’ Television Access (ATA) and San Francisco musician/curator Lisa Mezzacappa join forces to present a new live cinema series showcasing new work by Bay Area and West Coast artists. Experimental filmmakersand video artists collaborate with innovative local composer/performers on a series of new short works that premiere at Artists’ Television Access this spring, summer andfall. The spring edition of the series features new collaborations by Paul Clipson and Darren Johnston; Kerry Laitala and Aaron Novik; and Konrad Steiner and Matt Ingalls. The imagery spans found footage manipulated with modern video techniques, disjointed pop culture mash-ups and textured conceptual imagery. The music, performed live by ensembles chosen by the composers, spans sounds, forms and genres from experimental jazz to noise to indie pop to chamber music and electro-acoustic improv, incorporating meticulous composition and wide-open improvisation.  Mission Eye & Earwas conceived to celebrate and stimulate the diversity and creativity of local experimental filmmakers and composers, and to invite Bay Area film- and music-loving audiences to enjoy stellar work by local, often unsung, artists working outside mainstream visibility. For less than the price of a new release movie, audiences are invited to a uniquely Bay Area live cinema experience, and a glimpse of the creative process in a treasured Mission District venue.

Organized by Lisa Mezzacappa & Fara Akrami
with support from Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure Program

and the Subito Program of the American Composer’s Forum.

www.missioneyeear.com

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Artist Bios

PAUL CLIPSON makes experimental films exclusively with a Super8 camera. Clipson’s largely improvised, in-camera-edited Super-8mm films often employ multiple exposures, dissolves, and macro imagery, bringing to light subconscious preoccupations and unexpected visual forms. Master of color, shape and texture, he has collaborated with countless musicians at home and abroad and is a tireless creative force in the Bay Area arts community.

Oakland musician MATT INGALLS is a composer, clarinetist, concert producer, and computer music programmer. Often incorporating elements of improvisation, his music is heavily influenced by his long involvement in computer music. His composerly solo improvisations explore extended clarinet techniques that interact with the acoustic space, often as combination tones. Matt is the founder and co-director of sfSound, a new music series, ensemble, and internet radio station that has emerged as one of the most exciting and fiercely innovative contemporary music organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Since settling in San Francisco in 1997, Canada-born trumpeter DARREN JOHNSTON has built a web of alliances, from avant-garde excursions with the likes of the ROVA saxophone quartet and Myra Melford, to straight-ahead jazz outings with artists such as bassist/composer Marcus Shelby.  As a bandleader he first made his mark with the United Brassworkers Front, an infamous ensemble with a truly unique take on brass music that released two albums.   In ’07, Johnston released “Reasons for Moving,” which featured Fred Frith and Larry Ochs, and was released on the Not Two label.  In 2008 Johnston was labeled as one of twenty-five “trumpeters of the future” by Downbeat magazine.  His critically-acclaimed quintet CD on the Clean Feed label won four stars by four different critics in that same magazine, which helped to place him in the “Downbeat Critic’s Poll” for his trumpet playing.  This same recording, “The Edge of the Forest”, was listed as a “top ten of ‘09” recording by multiple critics, and given an honorable mention in the Village Voice’s listing of the same name, coming in at number 13. Currently, Darren’s primary focus is his “Nice Guy Trio”, which features Rob Reich on accordion, and Daniel Fabricant on bass, with an eclectic cast of guest musicians who blend together miraculously on seemingly disparate instruments such as pedal steel, strings, and Indian tablas.
KERRY LAITALA grew up in the wilds of the Maine coast, while developing a chronic passion for old things. She attended Massachusetts College of Art studying Photography and Film and received her Masters degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in Film. Laitala has received numerous awards such as the Princess Grace Award in 1996 and subsequent grants in 2004 and 2007. She has also won a 2007 GOLDIE from The Bay Guardian and has twice won a Golden Gate Award from the San fancisco International Film Festival. Her work has been screened internationally and in the celestial ether which connects us with the music of the spheres.

AARON NOVIK is a San Francisco composer and bass clarinetist who creates new sounds by combining as many disparate styles as possible.  from Brazilian choro, death metal, chamber music, indie rock, jazz, and Indian rhythms.  Each aspect of the compositional process is re-evaluated, and re-conceptualized, including melody, harmony, rhythm and timbre.  The end result is music reverent to its influences without being dependent on them.

Filmmaker and curator KONRAD STEINER lives in San Francisco and makes cinema performances with musicians and writers. He has worked live with the Jon Raskin Quartet, Graham Connah (Ted Brinkley)’s large and small ensembles, and non-commercially set the music of Frank Zappa, Anton Webern and The Fall to film.
Curator Bio

LISA MEZZACAPPA is a San Francisco-based bassist, composer and musical instigator. An active collaborator and curator in the Bay Area music community, she leads her own groups Bait & Switch and Nightshade, and co-leads the ensembles duo B., Cylinder, the Permanent Wave Ensemble, and the Oakland Active Orchestra. She collaborates frequently on cross-disciplinary projects in sound installation, digital poetry, film, sculpture and public music/art. As curator, for the past five years she has programmed the annual JazzPOP concert series at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; the monthly Monday Makeout creative music series in the Mission District of San Francisco, and the music and film series, Mission Eye and Ear, at the Red Poppy Art House and ATA. She has also curated and produced live music and film events at 21 Grand, Pro-Arts Gallery, the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Hypnodrome Theater. As part of Neighborhood Public Radio’s residency at the Whitney Biennial in 2008, she curated a week of free performances by outer-borough experimental musicians, broadcast live from a Madison Avenue storefront.www.lisamezzacappa.com