Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA presents
Pattern in Contemporary Film
Thursday, March 12, 2020, 7:00pm
At MOCA Ahmanson Auditorium, 250 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles
LA premieres!
Inspired by the exhibition With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985, Pattern in Contemporary Film investigates the way pattern, decoration, and typically-domestic subject matter is used as material in contemporary film and digital media. This group show includes work by Charles Woodman, Brian O’Connell, the Maternal Fantasies artist collective, and Jodie Mack.
In “Pulse Generator Pastry”, Charles Woodman, son of the artist Betty Woodman, repurposes patterns she prepared for ceramic sculptures as subjects for animation. The animation was deployed as an “attractor”, set up outside a 2016 gallery show of her work. Sculptor Brian O’Connell uses existing patterns – cycles of the moon and sun, chapter headings in an Italo Calvino book – to lend form and color to his 16mm film “Palomar”. Maternal Fantasies, a nine-person German collective, produces tableaux vivants; based on classical or artwork references, these images are completely reconstituted to render a contemporary, poetic account of motherhood and care, “freed from the corset of generalization.” Finally, filmmaker Jodie Mack depicts an abstract landscape using trinkets and costume jewelry in her film “Something Between Us”. Curated by Kate Brown
Tickets: : $15 general; $10 for seniors; $8 for students with ID; free for Filmforum and MOCA members. Available in advance from Brown Paper Tickets at or at the door
For more information: https://www.moca.org/program/los-angeles-filmforum-at-moca-presents-pattern-in-contemporary-film , www.lafilmforum.org or 323-377-7238, or education@moca.org
Screening:
PALOMAR
Brian O’Connell
2015, 16mm, color, silent, 12 minutes
“PALOMAR is a 16mm film approximately twelve minutes long, the film is a colored document of a partial solar eclipse viewable from Southern California on October 23 2014 and arose from an ongoing interest in the function of reflection and shadow in the production of an image and color. I filmed the eclipse using an adapted amateur telescope from Mount Wilson near LA (the site of the largest aperture telescope in the world until 1948, when it was over-taken by Palomar Observatory some 90 miles southeast in San Diego County). The film captures the primal light source, the sun, invoking procedures similar to the photogram – complicating the process of using shadows cast by the sun by depicting the shadow on an image of the sun from within that shadow.
“Working with a Hollywood color timer, the professional who adjusts the light used in printing color film to affect the color of a final print, I made a color negative from the black and white original. Each shot was colored according to the formal structure laid out in Calvino’s index, matching the numbers 1, 2, 3 with red, green, and blue light respectively. There are 33 shots in the film, one for each chapter plus seven shots at the end to represent the index.
“Color positive film printed from color-timed internegative printed from black and white original positive film. Shot Oct 23, 2014 at Mt Wilson Observatory, 1:33-3:45 pm.” – Brian O’Connell
Something Between Us
Jodie Mack
2015, 16mm, color, sound, 9.5 minutes
“A choreographed motion study for twinkling trinkets: costume jewelry and natural wonders join forces to perform plastic pirouettes, dancing a luminous lament until the tide comes in.” – Jodie Mack
Pulse Generator Pastry
Charles Woodman
2016, digital, 7.5 minutes, black and white, silent
“Pulse Generator Pastry is a collaboration with my mother, the ceramic artist Betty Woodman. Betty created the shapes, based on the forms she uses in her work. I animated those shapes and then used them as stencils in which both positive and negative spaces were filled with textures. The textures were created using a piece of analog audio test equipment called a pulse generator. The video was first shown in the store-front window at Salon 94 Gallery in NY, during Betty’s show there in Spring 2016. The video was designed as an ‘attractor,’ meant to encourage viewers in the street to enter the gallery. Somehow the rapper ASAP Ferg ended up shooting part of his music video for Let It Bang standing in front of the work.” – Charles Woodman
Drifting Checks
Charles Woodman
2019, digital, 1-minute, sound
“Drifting Checks was made with material produced during a residency at Signal Culture in Owego, NY. The outputs from several different waveform generators were converted to video signals and then mixed together. The results were then re-photographed off a video display. This short piece was made specifically for the Then, What If? project.” (CW) As described on its website, Then, What If? “curated by Gene Gort and Ken Steen from an international call … is a collection of 60 video clips and 60 sound compositions that are 60 seconds in duration each, and are paired randomly using a Cageian model of indeterminacy with 3600 potential variations.” The MOCA iteration combines Woodman’s image with Connecticut-based composer Joseph Hayes’s score, “Cablestayed.” http://nmnmne.org/thenwhatif.php
Shadowbox
Charles Woodman
2020, digital, 6.5 minutes, sound
LA Premiere!
Made as an optional set for the same dance it records, the film uses the forms of the dancers’ bodies as stencils or hold-out mats in a collaged moving image.
“Shadowbox is a collaboration with the New York based choreographer Rachel Thorne Germond. Originally, two dancers were filmed against a white wall wearing black costumes. Those images were then used as stencils and footage of “sprinkles” (filmed by Rachel on her cell phone) were placed sometimes-inside and sometimes-outside those dancers. Those images underwent further re-combinations, occasionally doubling the number of dancers on the screen. The footage was then re-edited to the music of composer Fred Frith. The result is an explosion of color, pattern, and movement in which figure, ground and layers all become mixed together. Shadowbox will be presented in Manhattan this May in a version in which a video will be projected on top of live dancers on the stage.” – Charles Woodman
Collaborators: Rachel Thorne Germond (choreography & camera), Charles Woodman (editing & camera), Larissa Asebedo & Kristin Reynolds (dancers), Fred Frith, Christophe Rieger, Jean-Luis Marchand, Darren Johnston (music).
Suspended Time, on Caring
Maternal Fantasies artist collective
Members of the collective: Lena Chen, Mikala Hyldig Dal, Magdalena Kallenberger, Hanne Klaas, Maicyra Leao, Sandra Moskova, Aino El Solh, Isabell Spengler, Olga Sonja Thorarensen
2020, digital, sound, 10 minutes
LA Premiere!
“Suspended Time, on Caring (a work-in-progress) is a contemporary, poetic contemplation of the discourse on motherhood(s) in cinematic form.
As a Berlin-based feminist collective of nine female artists and their thirteen children, Maternal Fantasies challenges and disrupts the notion of ONE singular motherhood with its artistic and theoretical practice.
In their studio-based working sessions, the collective experiments with mixed procedures borrowed from feminist practices, activist movements, and the Surrealists avant-garde to produce fantastical situations that lie somewhere between the everyday, the historic, and the transgressive. Classic texts on feminist care ethics and maternal theory nourish the group’s artistic production, along with subjective, autobiographical experiences externalized in automatic writing sessions. The group transforms these writings into choirs and solos. Our production sets are simultaneously sites of social experimentation and performative notions of motherhood(s). Working with a rotation of authors, directors and performers, they develop scenes, tableaux vivants, and performances for camera according to project-specific, self-imposed rules regarding: image composition, duration, action, motion, costumes, location, aesthetics, and props. Filmed or photographed during group residencies in the countryside of Germany, the scenes are compiled into mixed media installations and film works. The ten-minute video presented tonight is a fragment of a longer essayistic video piece to be completed and premiered on May 2nd, 2020 as part of the Advancement Awardees exhibition of the Arthur-Boskamp foundation in Hohenlockstedt, Northern Germany.
In response to the hierarchical model of the singular artist/auteur, our working methods favor “rotational authorship” and interdisciplinary collaboration in order to highlight the diversity of perspectives while inserting and perceiving singular experience as a way of thinking with and thinking over. The collective deals with motherhood as a paradoxical social practice including ambivalent experiences in relation to affections and subjectivities, time and work, practice and discourse.
Through interactions between bodies, objects, and spaces, mothers and children re-re-re-assemble and turn maternal fantasies into playful experiences, personal narratives into social questions, and body dimensions into fields of interaction.” – Maternal Fantasies artist collective
Artists bios:
Brian O’Connell
Born in Leuven, Belgium, Brian O’Connell is a multidisciplinary artist who works in technologies both old and new. Educated at Columbia University (BA, 1995) and California Institute of the Arts (MFA, 2002), he was a Fulbright Scholar at the Institute for Media Studies at the University of Siegen, Germany (1995–96).
Brian has exhibited institutionally and in galleries throughout the United States and abroad. His public projects include a semi-permanent installation at the Central Library in Leuven, Belgium; a 13-foot concrete boat produced on the beach in Malibu, California; and a 30-foot concrete hull cast from an abandoned fishing boat in Istanbul, Turkey. Brian has been included in the Hammer Museum’s 2014 biennial, “Made in L.A.,” and MoMA PS1’s 2010 “Greater New York.”
In 2016, Brian and Deirdre O’Dwyer founded Rakish Light (www.rakishlight.com), an experimental press that produces and publishes offset print projects and collaborations among artists, writers, and thinkers using refurbished small scale commercial presses.
Charles Woodman is an electronic artist working in video and expanded media. His recent projects have concentrated on the creation of multi-image video installations for museums and galleries, and the integration of video with live performance, often in collaboration with musicians or dancers. Exhibitions of his work include screenings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Block Museum of Art in Chicago, Black Maria Film and Video Festival in Edison, NJ, and the American Dance Festival in Raleigh, NC. Woodman is a founding member of the video performance group video sAVant and has been a pioneer in the development of Live Cinema – real time video editing as live performance. Appearances by the group include performances at ENSAD, Paris, France, Spazio Contemporanea, Brescia, Italy, ISEA, Dubai, Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, and the San Francisco Cinematheque. Woodman’s connection to the concurrent MOCA exhibition With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1975-1985 is personal, as the son of ceramic artist Betty Woodman.
Jodie Mack (born 1983; London, UK) is an experimental animator who received her MFA in film, video, and new media from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007. Combining the formal techniques and structures of abstract/absolute animation with those of cinematic genres, her handmade films use collage to explore the relationship between graphic cinema and storytelling, the tension between form and meaning. Musical documentary or stroboscopic archive: her films study domestic and recycled materials to illuminate the elements shared between fine-art abstraction and mass-produced graphic design. The works unleash the kinetic energy of overlooked and wasted objects and question the role of decoration in daily life.
Mack’s 16mm films have screened at a variety of venues including the Locarno Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, the Jeonju International Film Festival, and the Viennale. She has presented solo programs at the 25FPS Festival, Anthology Film Archives, BFI London Film Festival, Harvard Film Archive, National Gallery of Art, REDCAT, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennale, and Wexner Center for the Arts among others. Her work has been featured in publications including Artforum, Cinema Scope, The New York Times, and Senses of Cinema. She was the 2017/18 Roberta and David Logie/Film Study Center Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a 2018/19 Fellow at the Film Study Center Fellow at Harvard University. She is a 2019 Artist In Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and she is an Associate Professor of Animation at Dartmouth College. http://www.jodiemack.com/
Maternal Fantasies artist collective is an evolving and interdisciplinary group of international artists and cultural producers based in Berlin, Germany.
We share our research on motherhood, care work, and its representation in the arts. We use, share, and reflect autobiographic material within our group. We seek to shape the discourse of motherhood through our artistic working process and to enhance the visibility of contemporary feminist positions addressing motherhood(s) in the arts.
Working since 2018 on collaborative projects, we have developed our own repertoire of methods –using performative games, writing sessions, rotational authorship/direction/hosting of events, coming up with various sets of rules for our different projects in photography, performance, installations, workshops and film/video. We are at times carefully integrating our children in the process of our collective art production.
https://www.maternalfantasies.net/about
Current group members are: Lena Chen, Mikala Hyldig Dal, Magdalena Kallenberger, Hanne Klaas, Maicyra Leao, Sandra Moskova, Aino El Solh, Isabell Spengler, Olga Sonja Thorarensen
Isabell Spengler is a filmmaker focusing on the intersection of film and performance. She investigates “live film” and methods of transposing performance into film. In her collaborations with other artists, Spengler sets up film shoots as arenas for conceptual play, in which utopian ideas and personal wishes are visualized through photography, drawing, performance, costume design and three-dimensional models. The works frequently generate humor by emphasizing discrepancies between preconceived and factual realities.
Since 1998, Isabell Spengler’s work, including 30 films, video installations, immersive environments and performances, has been exhibited in festivals and exhibitions worldwide; including the Berlinale Film Festival (2007, 2009, 2010, and 2012), Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Museum of Modern Art São Paulo, and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul. She has taught at various art colleges and universities in Germany and North America, most notably at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she worked as a lecturer and guest professor for experimental film and media art from 2004 until 2014.
www.isabellspengler.net
Magdalena Kallenberger is a visual artist, researcher and writer working across film, photography
and installation. She holds an MFA in Media Art and a BFA both from the University of Arts Berlin. She served as Professor of Practice at the American University in Cairo (2016-2017) and Lecturer for timebased media (2010-16) at the German University in Cairo. Since 2018 Kallenberger is a Ph.D. candidate at the Bauhaus University Weimar. She also is a fellow at the Bauhaus Research School and the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation. Her practice-based Ph.D. “Re/Production: Chronopolitics, Affective Labor, Care and the Maternal” takes diverse forms of research materials as a starting point to (re-) position the maternal as a space of social, political, cultural and economic conflict. Her artistic language combines art historical references with autobiographical elements and personal narratives, using humour and poetical fiction as a subversive method.
Her works produced in solo and collective constellations have been shown at Haus der Kulturen
der Welt, Berlinische Galerie, nGbK neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, alpha nova galerie futura,
Pavlov‘s Dog, SCHAU FENSTER – Raum für Kunst, n.b.k. Berlin. Camera Austria Graz, Short Film Festival Oberhausen, M1 Arthur Boskamp Foundation, African Biennale of Photography – Rencontres de Bamako, Mali. CIC Contemporary Image Collection, Darb 1718, Cairotronica, Cairo, Egypt. Fak‘ugesi Festival, Johannesburg, South Africa. Able Baker Contemporary‚ Portland ME, USA. Africa Museum, Berg en Dal, The Netherlands. WINDOW gallery, Winnipeg, Canada etc. http://www.mkallenberger.de/
Maicyra Leão e Silva is Professor at Theater Department of Federal University of Sergipe, Brazil. She holds a PhD in Performing Arts and a Masters in Contemporary Art, working interdisciplinary between theater, performance art and photography. Her practice-based research explores performance art in public spaces and collaborative methodologies in convivial situations. Within her collective and solo works, she has led socially engaged projects, as well as experimental artistic con gurations, which have been awarded four grants by the Brazilian National Arts Foundation, and were performed along Europe and Latin America. As a scholar, she published a number of articles in academic journals, especially in Brazilian context. She completed recently a post-doctoral project at Freie Universität Berlin on motherhood and art.
Lena Chen is a Chinese American artist and activist exploring gender, intimacy, labor, and trauma.
From modeling nude in the aftermath of revenge porn to breastfeeding members of the public, she constructs situations of intense yet fleeting intimacy within participatory rituals and one-to-one performances— written and enacted in real-time with real consequences. Performance permits her to play artist and muse, exhibitionist and voyeur, victim and perpetrator in order to make visible the secret desires and shames of strangers. She has worked with communities such as sexual violence survivors and sex workers to create alternative networks of care and platforms for self-representation.
Heal Her, which she co-founded in 2018, uses expressive arts techniques and collaborates internationally with artists, activists, and trauma survivors to convene storytelling circles on healing. Chen has presented work across Europe and North America, spoken at SXSW, re:publica, Yale, Stanford, and Oxford, and has been featured in international media for her activism. She holds a BA in sociology from Harvard University and is a MFA candidate at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Art. www.lenachen.com
Aino Onia (Aino el Solh) is a Finnish visual artist who explores creative writing, text performances, and the world of numbers. Her current project, “My First Million” investigates the different dimensions of artistic praxis from production to earning logic.
She has worked for Aalto University in Helsinki in the Sustainable Global Technologies course, guiding students to create energy and waste management scenarios using renewable energy solutions, and to take on different roles within cultural production. As an environmentalist, she has participated in several environmental art exhibitions. She holds a BA degree from the Willem de Koonig Akademie in Rotterdam (2005) and a MA degree from the University of Art and Design of Helsinki (2009). She is based in Berlin and exhibits regularly.
Hanne Klaas started with pinhole photography and studied cinematography in Berlin, after initially working in the film industry. A recipient of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) scholarship, she studied in the film program at SFU in Vancouver, Canada, completing her degree with a feature-length documentary which won the young talent prize for camerawork at the Internationalen Frauenfilmfestival in Dortmund/Köln. For her tri-national masters program in Film and Media Studies, she studied at the Franco-German University in Lyon, Utrecht University, and the Bauhaus University of Weimar. Currently, she resides in Berlin with her three children and works as a camera woman and editor for documentary films while developing her own next feature-length documentary project.
Filmography (selection): Ole, Deutschland 2011, Dokumentarfilm, 102‘ | Regie, Realisation Hanne Klaas | Produktion Beuth Hochschule Berlin. Shorts (selection): drei (2007), about beauty (2008), Wir sind Marzahn (2016/2017)
Mikala Hyldig Dal is an artist, curator and author in Berlin, Cairo and The Hague. She conducts artistic research examining visual culture through visual-creative and text-based interventions. Her works often manifest as video-based installations, but also as performance, drawing and painting. She has exhibited internationally at spaces such as Martin Gropius Bau Berlin, Cairo Townhouse Gallery, Nikolaj Kunsthal Copenhagen, Fluxfactory New York and Azad Gallery Tehran. She is interested in the connections between image production and image destruction (iconoclasm), in the processes of visualization and invisibility, and in the power and inequality relations in the visual field. Or, as the philosopher Jacques Rancière puts it: Mikala deconstructs „aesthetic regimes“ with her artistic works, her curatorial projects and theoretical reflections.
https://cargocollective.com/mikala-hyldig-dal
Sandra Moskova is a scholar in cultural and media philosophy, born in Moscow, raised in Bulgaria and currently based in Berlin. She is a PhD candidate at the Berlin University of the Arts, where her dissertation explores the knowledge of literary fiction, resp. the novel between „deep reading“ and machine learning. Her work proposes a methodology, rooted both in positivist and humanist traditions, which embraces an object-philosophical attitude towards the history of the social realm, i.e. the history of the novel.
In her texts, Sandra also projects her theoretical background onto artistic contexts (LEAP, transmediale) and expands her academic perspectives in different edited writings (Forum zur Genealogie des Mediendenkens Bd. 2, ISEA Hong Kong, Genius Loci Weimar).
http://www.sandramoskova.com/
Olga Sonja Thorarensen is a performance maker from Iceland currently based in Berlin. She holds a B.F.A. in acting from the Iceland Academy of the Arts and completed her MA at Weißensee Academy of Arts, Berlin. In her work, Olga explores staging “the self” and how, by being both the creator and the object of the creation, a performer can impact the way they are perceived, resist objectification, and claim agency. She is interested in the act of viewing and the experience of being viewed and in exploring the possibilities in the relationship between the spectator and the performer. Her interest also lies in making collective works, and in injecting reality to the stage in order question social constructions or norms. She has shown her work at Everybody’s Spectacular (Reykjavik) and Oktoberdans (Bergen). Since 2018, she has participated in Diverse Nordic Voices, a professional development program in choreography.
Pattern in Contemporary Film reading list:
Lisa Baraitser: Enduring Time
Aram Boyajian: poems
Italo Calvino: Palomar
Hélène Cixous: The Laugh of the Medusa
Rachel Cusk: Lebenswerk (in German)
Sara Ruddick: Maternal Thinking – Toward a Politics of Peace
Adrienne Rich: Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
Cecile Starr and Robert Russett: Experimental Animation
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Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA furthers MOCA’s mission to question and adapt to the changing definitions of art and to care for the urgency of contemporary expression with bimonthly screenings of film and video organized and co-presented by Los Angeles Filmforum—the city’s longest-running organization dedicated to weekly screenings of experimental film, video, documentary, and animation.
Education Programs at MOCA, including Contemporary Art Start and Sunday Studio, and the MOCA Teen Program, are generously supported by The Hearst Foundations, Banc of California, MOCA Projects Council, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, The Capital Group Companies Charitable Foundation, Edison International, Joseph Drown Foundation, The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation, Satterberg Foundation, Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, Michael Asher Foundation, The Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation, The Rhonda S. Zinner Foundation, The Winnick Family Foundation, and Pazia Bermudez-Silverman.
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