Los Angeles Filmforum presents
FORMATIONS: Selected Works by Francis Almendárez, 2013-2025
Sunday May 4, 2024, 7:00pm
At 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90057
In person: Artist Francis Almendárez & Programmer Diego Robles
Including the World Theatrical Premieres of six videos – Voices of Our Mothers, Dinner as I Remember, rhythm and (p)leisure, (be)coming home, Navigating the Archives Within, and Denim Terrains!
Tickets: $15 general, $10 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members
https://link.dice.fm/j7b6dbfb05fa
These selected works by Francis Almendárez delve into the everyday in distinct ways, displaying a Los Angeles hardly ever seen. Intimate and personal, yet abstract and poetic – Almendárez toggles between showing us reflections of his lived reality, and embodying the images and sounds of the lived reality as it is shown.
FORMATIONS broadly defined brings these works into conversation with the recent past, and our current time. The compiled videos together broadly outline the ways Almendárez has delved into moving images, the world of soundscapes, and ontological interpretation. Like jazz sketched musically by an ekphrastic poem, Francis sketches moments in life that connect to larger patterns of thought and feeling.
As each of these videos was completed, they were gradually exhibited outside California, in mostly small DIY circles, classrooms, or art gallery installation settings. Never before screened in California, and ever screened theatrically anywhere in the world, all six videos will have their World Theatrical Premieres. These videos together ask us to link our private thinking with our environment around us.
FORMATIONS refers to both great landscapes traversed physically, and the significant experiences that come along with our upbringing and growth. In Latin-America there’s a question one can ask of another when inquiring about their life trajectory – ‘Como te formaste?’. In the case of artists, it can open discussion about their way of being and aesthetic development , and while the question doesn’t translate smoothly into English (i.e. ‘How did you train?’), in Spanish – especially in a Latin-American context – it simultaneously can be about one’s personal and familial cultivation, one’s intellectual influences, one’s artistic development, one’s moral and ethical instincts, and one’s own integral and truthful reach toward maximum potential. Often, such a question is within a backdrop that has already acknowledged great adversity and obstacles one has lived through, and if nothing else, the question usually is reinforcing the drive and consistency one recognizes in the other. This kaleidoscope of multiple meanings that Almendárez’s documentation and videos bring, serve to playfully reflect on Los Angeles, its textures, tones, and colors that float amongst the escapist narratives, planned obsolescence, and resiliency of its inhabitants.
Francis Almendárez is an artist, filmmaker, and educator from South Central, Los Angeles. His work takes many different forms including exhibitions, screenings, performances, workshops, and collaborations that have been presented across museum, university, and DIY spaces both nationally and internationally. Through the merging of history, autoethnography, and cultural production, his works offer ways to navigate and reconcile with intergenerational trauma and reclaim diasporic identities. Recent presentations include screenings at Miami New Media Festival and Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris; DIY photography and filmmaking workshops in Honduras and El Salvador; public photo-murals at FotoFest, Houston; and collaborative performances at Antenna, New Orleans and Prospect Art, Los Angeles. Almendárez is an Assistant Professor of Photography/Video and Studio Art at California State University San Bernardino, and previously lectured at University of Houston School of Art and Houston Community College. He received his MFA (with Distinction) from Goldsmiths, University of London, and BFA in Sculpture/New Genres from Otis College of Art and Design. www.francisalmendarez.com
Diego Robles is an educator, artist, filmmaker, programmer and curator. Inspired by independent film, video stores, public libraries, comics, and a lot of live and recorded music, he’s a Film School graduate of the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television, as well as an MFA graduate of CalArts’s School of Film/Video & the School of Critical Studies. Robles currently teaches Art Education History, Theory, and Practice, as well as internships for Art & Design at San Diego State University. He also teaches New Genres, Creativity, Imagination & Consciousness, Visual Studies, Art & Community, Art Writing, and Chicanx Art at CSU San Bernardino. His current visual and media artwork inquiries into the philosophical underpinnings of how we interpret our inner and outer world during different points in our lives, and the impact this has on how our human and non-human relationships evolve/adapt/struggle through our changing economic, environmental, political, and social-cultural climate.
