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Tana Sprague (Lissom) will perform a score for a film by Vanessa Woods
Elise Baldwin will perform scores for three videos by Anthony Discenza

Tana Sprague (Lissom) is a sound and video artist, transfixed with micro details. With focus fluctuating between digital and organic, her work creates a space where one complements the other. Inspired by the elegant complexity of organic forms, she utilizes various electronic and digital devices to synthesize a similar enveloping intricacy. Since 2004, Tana has worked with Recombinant Media Lab, and in January of 2009 she lead the partnership development with Gray Area Foundation for the Arts and RML, and was the Director of Operations at GAFFTA and RML. She has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts at the University of California at San Diego, where she was granted two consecutive research fellowships at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. She received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Electronic Music and Recording Media at Mills College.

http://sensory-perception.net/

Vanessa Woods graduated with an MFA in film, with honors, from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her artwork and films have been exhibited internationally and have received numerous awards including a Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship for Film from the San Francisco Arts Commission, a Film Arts Foundation Personal Works Grant, and the San Francisco Art Institute’s MFA Film Fellowship. Woods’ films have been broadcast or screened by the Education Channel, the Centre International d’Art (France), The Anthology Film Archives (New York), the Oberhausen Film Festival (Germany) and San Francisco International Film Festival. Woods is currently working on several new films, including a feature-length documentary titled Mimita, (www.Mimita.com) which follows a family of women raising their adopted child in the Bronx, New York.

http://www.vanessawoods.com/php/home.php

Elise Baldwin is active in the San Francisco experimental music and electronic art community, Elise Baldwin focuses on solo intermedia performance and collaborative music ventures. Her work demonstrates clear predilections: a fondness for recombinant media and collage techniques, a fascination with human memory and technological forms of communication, and a historic multiplicity with regard to medium. Elise holds a degree in Film and Video production as well as an MFA in Electronic Music from Mills College. She has designed sound and created musical compositions for many theater, dance and film productions. She has performed recently at SF Cinematheque, ResBox, New York Electronic Arts Festival, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Edgetone Music Festival, the Brutal Sound FX Festival, E.S.P. Media Lounge, CalArts CEAIT Festival and the National Queer Arts Festival. She has received numerous awards, including Experimental Television Center and CESTA residencies, a Harvestworks Artist in Residency, the Frogs Peak Award for Experimental Music, and a Howard Scripps Award.

http://www.clattertrap.com/

Anthony Discenza was born in New Jersey and currently lives in Oakland, California. He received his undergraduate degree in Studio Art at Wesleyan University in 1990, and an MFA at the California College of Arts and Crafts in 2000. In addition to various individual projects, he participates in HalfLifers—an ongoing collaboration with longtime friend and fellow video artist, Torsten Z. Burns. Discenza’s solo and collaborative work has been shown at numerous national and international venues, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The New York Video Festival, the Pandaemonium Festival, The Pacific Film Archive, The Impakt Festival, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He was recently included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial.

http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$artistdetail?DISCENZAA

For more information: www.volumeprojects.org or www.atasite.org

Curated by: VOLUME and Kadet Kuhne

A limited-edition DVD of the five commissions will be produced.

Two experimental queer works will be screened at Artists Television Access on Thursday, Sept. 23^th, 2010. The program title misremembers the opening lyric to the theme to Imitation of Life. The tune hauntingly floods Luther Price’s A (1995). Alongside David Scheid’s video, Margot Kidder (2005), these works reconstruct Hollywood from a space of queer fantasy, creating private narratives from popular fiction. The event is curated by moving-image scholar Bradford Nordeen and co-hosted by local author and critic Kevin Killian.

 Named one of the top-20 living avant-garde filmmakers in Film Comment’s recent poling, Boston-based super-8 filmmaker Luther Price has been frequently likened to Jack Smith, Karen Finley and Matthew Barney for his raw, visceral cinema. In A (1995) Price concocted the most narrative tale of his 25-year career: a cyclical feature in which a faded starlet (Edie) courts suitor after suitor and fades into an alcoholic Lassie-laden haze. Price portrays the heroine as she spirals deeper into destructive delusions, turning on her lovers like an amped-up Jeanne Dielman. Edie is also a ghostly, childhood memory, based on Price’s mother and her obsessive viewing of woman’s pictures.

 David Scheid is a video artist whose work addresses pathology and obsessive compulsive disorder. Margot Kidder meticulously reconstructs 3 films from the actress’ golden period to illuminate Kidder’s peculiar personal narrative. Scheid infers that Kidder’s infamous downfall was present all along in these fragile performances. Margot Kidder throws these clues into plain view, presenting a dismaying decoding of these otherwise commercial films. Like Price’s work, the film also serves as an intimate portrait of a male fan’s obsession with a female star. The 13-minute found-footage film is an alarming depiction of the filmmaker’s arousal, disdain, compassion and compulsion towards the eponymous subject.

 This event will be accompanied by a free publication of images, illustrations, an essay, and artist writings.

 LUTHER PRICE is an internationally exhibited super8 filmmaker, sculptor and

performance artist. His work has been screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Thread Waxing Space and San Francisco

Cinematheque, among other institutions. He is a professor at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Massachusetts College of Art. His work is

distributed by the Filmmakers’ Coop, Canyon Cinema, Lux and Lightcone. 

 DAVID SCHEID received his M.F.A. from CalArts in 2005.  His videos were shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, REDCAT, and Highways Performance Space.  Scheid lives in Pittsburgh, PA, where he paints abstract landscapes, trains for marathons, and is pursuing his medical degree.  His interests include psychiatry and pathology.

 BRADFORD NORDEEN is a New York-based programmer and moving-image scholar. He has organized screenings internationally at venues in New York and Los Angeles. He has contributed articles to The Fanzine Press, X-TRA and Animal Shelter. His essay on Luther Price, ‘Watching, Wounded: Avant-Garde Psychodrama and Aversion in Luther Price’s Meat’ is forthcoming in Film-Philosophy from Open Humanities Press (Winter, 2010).

KEVIN KILLIAN is a poet, novelist, critic and playwright. He has written three novels: Shy (1989), Arctic Summer (1997) and Spreadeagle (forthcoming), a book of memoirs: Bedrooms Have Windows (1989), two book of poetry: Argento Series (2001) and Action Kylie (2008), three chapbooks: Little Men (1996), I Cry Like A Baby (2001) and Impossible Princess (2009).He has written for Framework, Artforum, Artweek, etc., etc. With Dodie Bellamy he edits the literary/art zine Mirage #4/Period[ical] in San Francisco.