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Mothering Every Day is a program of film and video work about embodying / performing motherhood, domestic labor, and the quotidian. The idea for this program was generated by the artists themselves who were frustrated about the challenges of getting work about maternity screened in the film and art world. From poetic gesture to direct address to the everyday labor of the domestic space, the works themselves borrow from documentary, experimental and installation traditions. This program seeks to re-frame motherhood as a valuable site of intellectual exploration and artistic production and expand on a decades-long dialogue considering maternity as an essential feminist concern.

Program:

The Table, Farheen Haq, 5 min (based in Victoria, BC)

Farheen is a South Asian Canadian artist who lives and works on the Coast Salish territories of the Esquimalt and Songhees Nations in Victoria, British Columbia. She was born and raised in the Niagara region of Ontario. Farheen’s media based practice explores cultural inscriptions of the body, ritual and gesture.

The Table is a video diptych of gestures that emerge from my subconscious where I tap into a lineage of women who have come before: those who washed by hand, made rotis, ground up spices, swaddled, wrapped and comforted. By wrapping myself in the long tablecloth, I am the baby, the young child and also the grandmother wrapped in a white sari.

Maternity Test, Irene Lusztig, 14 min (based in Santa Cruz, CA)

Irene is a filmmaker, teacher, visual artist, archival researcher, and amateur seamstress. For the past decade, her work has been centered on public feminism, language, and histories of women and women’s bodies. Eleven women are invited to read a text composited from anonymous mothering.com forum posts. In turns, they narrate an intimate experience of traumatic c-section birth. The collective reading raises shifting questions about idealized birth, maternal language, reality, performance, public feminism, and private confession. Maternity Test is a screen test, an audition, and an exercise in empathy and embodiment.

Mama Virtual: Ana & Aleyda, Jeny Amaya, 12 min (based in Los Angeles)

Jeny’s work explores autobiographical narratives, notions of family, and how the temporality of the past materializes itself in the present of the Salvadoran diaspora in California. A selection from a longer, episodic series of portraits of immigrant mothers, Mama Virtual: Ana & Aleyda materializes the virtual sphere that transnational mothers construct in order to maintain contact with their children and families back in their home countries. Separated from their children, Ana and Aleyda externalize this virtual realm through their performance of the “mother’s touch” through the touchscreen of a phone, digital images, phone cards, and other mediated technologies.

Our Summer Made Her Light Escape, Sasha Waters Freyer, 4.5 min (based in Richmond, Virginia)

Sasha is a moving image artist who makes unsentimental films about the loss of innocence, real or imagined. Trained in photography and the documentary tradition, she fuses original and found footage in 16mm film and digital media. Our Summer Made Her Light Escape is a wordless portrait of interiority, maternal ambivalence and the passage of time.

Mothertime, Kristy Guevara-Flanagan, 60 min (based in Los Angeles)

Kristy is a Los Angeles based artist who teaches documentary at the University of California Los Angeles. Her work in film explores gender representation and the lives of women in large and small scales, as well as modern California culture. Embracing the action-oriented technology of the Go-Pro camera, Mothertime is an essayistic portrait sweeping us into a corporeal experience in parenting. By using a very small, portable camera worn by mother and child, or left on any surface and turned on and off remotely, this video is a real-time, sensorial journey that plays in the physical and emotional space between mother and child.

4pm -7pm

Ancient Greek philosophers wrote of four temperaments (or ‘humors’) that color all of creation: sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic. Urbanity is part of this creation, and also embodies versions of these dispositions. The Humors video series suggests urban behaviors and relationships, those of people and of the built environment itself.

Chicago artist Yuge Zhou’s first west coast solo exhibition entitled “The Humors” will open on March 4th, running until may 13th. This exhibition features four video installations that explore the four humors (sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic), inspired by ancient Greek philosophy but reinterpreted in a modern context to suggest urban behavior and relationships. The sound design for this series is by Stephen Farrell.

For over a year, Zhou documented scenes of various urban locations and then collaged them into a mélange to reveal various temperaments of how the environment and humans mold and shape each other.

“The work originates from a simple desire to make people aware of and reconsider their relationships with their surroundings—both the physical and the psychological world they live in. With the camera acting as an extension of my viewing, I document the ‘untrained performances’ of everyday moments within their confined spaces and rearrange and assemble these documentations into collaged scenes that sometimes suggests an incomplete narrative fragment, an allegorical tale or a miniature stage to gaze upon, all with an unexpected sense of mystery, anxiety, joy or fear. This process of looking and altering helps me to distill and understand these spaces and their inhabitants, not without an impulse to poeticize and transform them into my own psychological universe of introspection and isolation.”

The installation for one of the pieces, Midtown Flutter is inspired by the concept of architectural relief (a technique where the sculpted elements remain attached but raised above the background plane). Audiences experience a gradual shift in the appearance and depth of the installation from a flat image to a three-dimensional view with protruding geometric shapes. Zhou uses techniques like relief and projection mapping to enhance the framed glimpses of scenes as well as emphasize the physicality of digital video.

The Humors series (the sound designer for the series is Stephen Farrell):

Green Play
Green play is a joyful orchestration of one of the great meeting places in New York City—Central Park, a utopian playground and repository shared by locals and tourists alike. The spliced footage choreographs a single summer Sunday and encapsulates an optimism that is central to American life.

Midtown Flutter
Social synchronization is a phenomenon where individuals within a group influence one another’s behavioral patterns. For Midtown Flutter, I shot a variety of architecture in midtown Manhattan, allowing passersby to interrupt the scene. By selecting and then composing the video footage according to the formal qualities of the architecture within the scene, the architecture in turn dictates the patterns and flow of the pedestrians. Midtown becomes a flattened, uniform construct for this play of texture, rhythm and interruptions.

Deep Ends 
Deep Ends suggests a tension between carefree buoyancy, vulnerability, and inherent risk. Water on the edge of an urban landscape invites crowds, and shot from a long distance, the scene strangely oscillates between leisure fun and the aftermath of a disaster.

Soft Plots
Soft Plots portrays a conception of urban living that is both group-oriented and discontinuous.
In many ways, we live big cities like we live small towns—except that our community is
scattered across a dense network of other communities and other storied lives of which we
only catch a glimpse. Soft Plots is a mental map of meaningful locations and (richly-inhabited)
voids in between.

Artist Bio:
Yuge Zhou is a Chinese born, Chicago-based artist whose video and installation works portray ‘urban dispositions’ and explore the complex interactions between humans and their environment. Zhou earned her Master of Fine Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She also holds a Master of Engineering from Syracuse University. Zhou has exhibited her work nationally and internationally including the Grand Rapids Art Museum; Elmhurst Art Museum; York Art Gallery in UK; Chicago Cultural Center; SIGGRAPH Asia in Japan; Chicago Design Museum; Athens Institute for Contemporary Art (GA); New York State Museum among many others. Zhou's work has also been featured in the New York Magazine; The Huffington Post, Grand Rapids Magazine and Aesthetica Magazine. Zhou recently received the Santo Foundation Individual Artist Award.
Website: yugezhou.com
Instagram: @yugezhou