*American Airlines Festival Discount*

Film Festival Schedule pdf

Opening Night pdf

Wednesday, Sept. 26 pdf

Thursday, Sept. 27 pdf

Friday, Sept. 28 pdf

Saturday, Sept. 29 pdf

Sunday, Sept. 30 pdf

Installations pdf

INSTALLATIONS
Education Gallery

Our Cosmos, Our Chaos
Erica Cho
(single channel video with monitor, 2005)
This piece explores the connection between mystical practice and social resistance. It tells the story of IN, a young girl mired in Korea's turbulent history and animistic traditions. In a potential dream state, IN has left her home in present-day Koreatown, L.A. for a secret world filled with ancestral ghosts and references, both fantastic and real. Repressed crimes committed by forces of greed and war against the populace during the Korean War return in the wake of historical amnesia. Guided by animal deities, alive to her new surroundings, and coming to terms with her own ignorance and power, IN struggles to understand her place in unrecorded history. But first, she will have to face a pair of twins from Los Angeles who have invaded her dream in their own quest for historical redemption.

Our Cosmos Our Chaos arouses Korean Shamanism and secret society traditions, and their collective metaphoric potential against imperial remnants, specifically: Korea’s division in 1945; the 1950-53 War; the Korean diaspora; North Korea’s isolation; and the US military occupation of South Korea—issues that have gained recent international attention.

La Specola: Medicine and the Mythology of the Vagina Dentata
Caitlin Berrigan
(DVD Rom with computer, 2004)
“In La Specola (meaning “the observatory”), I chose to focus on the gynecological examination as a paradigm of our conflicted relationship with desire, ownership, and control of bodies. Processes of acculturation have created conditions under which individuals become objects of medicine. Western medicine contains within it hierarchical, gendered power dynamics, such that the passive body of the examined is consumed according to the desires of the active examiner. The inspection of the vagina and the behaviors that sustain it are perhaps evocative of our general approach to the body’s mysterious interiors. Innumerable cultures with a lasting written or oral history make some reference to the archetype of the vagina dentata, or the toothed vagina. The practice of fantasizing teeth in soft, dark places informs the ways in which medicine approaches the vagina. It is a fantasy in which fear, desire, and repulsion combine. At heart in both myth and medicine is to control and make visible the body’s mysterious caverns, which are at once seductive, grotesque, pathological, and sacred.” -CB

Unlikely Canvasses
Amy Jackson
(Protoquadro on plasma screen, 2007, Italy/Netherlands/Puerto Rico)
Protoquadro (neologism from Greek "protos": first and Italian "quadro": painting) is an artistic technique and technological invention to reinvent the object of painting. A protoquadro produces automated visual compositions starting from thematic photographic source material and developing it using a generative compositing technique.

These compositions result in an ever-changing digital painting where artistic intuitions, in the form of code and algorithms, let shapes, colors and lights intermingle and evolve over time. Unpredictable combinations and interactions of elements will generate a continuous change in the vision that therefore is unique in every moment and will never be the same again.

The Protoquadro team for Unlikely Canvases consists of Federico Bonelli (Director), Maurizio (TeZ) Martinucci (Artistic Director and Designer), Amy Jackson (Artistic Content and Design Consultant).

Untitled  (sleeper/dressform)
Gillian Brown
(Video projection in sculpture, 56" h., 1999-2004)

A video projection is directed upward from inside a pedestal/box onto a gauze-covered wire dress form.  Parts of  rooms -- a ceiling, a suggestion of a door, a bed --  are constructed in miniature within the torso of the form.   The single video projection is intercepted by these variously transparent objects and is thereby divided into separate layers inside the torso.  Like divided attention, the single beam seems to multiply as it alights on the different objects.  A small sleeper stirs in bed while birds and an occasional piece of furniture fly above on the ceiling and roof.  Projected forms glide across the gauze that covers and defines the outside wire dress form, while they also float across the restless sleeper within.  The exterior figural form and the small sleeper within form a divided self; together they are observer and observed.  Like the video beam, they are one and multiple.

Turnstyle!
Zulma Aguiar
(Two channel video screening on plasma screens on opposite walls, 2006)
Turnstyle! hilariously explores the issues of Homeland Security Border and Immigration at the US/Mexican Border. The artist performs a US border agent in one video channel and a Mexican Customs agent in another. The subject stands in the middle of the gallery with both videos looping, juxtaposing the different border-crossing simulated experiences.

The piece aims to invite users to the experience of a contemporary US/Mexican border inspection.  Imagine you're in a turnstyle border door and allow the videos to whirl you around the immigration discourse until you're not sure exactly who what or where you are.

The New “F” Word
Brigid Maher & Leena Jayaswal
(Single channel video on monitor, 2007)
This video installation explores the relevancy of feminism for Generation Y. Young women from various backgrounds speak about their ideas about feminism and how it applies to their own life. The women tell stories of sexism in the workplace, street harassment, and how feminism ties into race. Young women today have varied experiences from the activists that fought for women’s rights in the seventies. The New F Word looks at how much has changed since then, and what new problems have arisen.  These interviews are juxtaposed with social activists fighting for women’s rights in the past and contemporary circles.

[back to top]