Co-presented with The Flaherty
Curated by Kelsey White and L u m i a
In person: Gina Telaroli in conversation with Rachael Guma
In person & online
Microscope is very pleased to co-present an evening of experimental films in collaboration with The Flaherty. The program, curated by Kelsey White and L u m i a, includes a selection of ten films ranging from 1974 to 2019 by Leslie Supnet, Emily Van Loan, Paige Taul, Alexandra Cuestain, Sylvia Schedelbauer, Narcisa Hirsch, Rachael Guma, Vanessa Renwick, Thirza Cuthand, and Eve-Lauryn LaFountain, which all respond to an universal theme of the multifacetedness of reality and human experience. The event will conclude with an in-person discussion with filmmaker Rachael Guma and Gina Telaroli.
From curators Kelsey White and L u m i a:
“There are filmmakers whose vision of the world is expansive enough to embrace multiple realities at once. Their films shift from an introspective felt sense to the encompassing surface of a landscape, or they reflect at once on an eternal present as well as its unceasing farewells. They are attuned to the tension between childhood innocence and callous maturity, between the warmth of physical longing and the impersonal codes that manipulate desire. In the midst of all of these comings and goings, these filmmakers look at their own experiences and forge through their works an unabashed sensitivity not only towards life and love, but also towards the anger, heartbreak, and cynicism that permeates the air we breathe.”
Please note: In person seating has a limited capacity of 30 audience members. Proof of vaccination for Covid-19 and masks required.
PROGRAM:
The Peak Experience
by Leslie Supnet, digital, 2018, 10 minutes
Like in a dream
Being detached
Where you can explore
Many things in the past
Experiencing the present
The essence and future of you.
Who Wants to Fall in Love (2019)
by Emily Van Loan, 16mm to digital, 2019, 6 minutes
An exercise in introspection, a request for patience, an exploration of space both internal and external. Have you ever felt connected to someone you’ve never met?
The Promise
by Paige Taul, 16mm to digital, 2019, 5 minutes
An exploration of the control one has of one's own life and the lives of others in it. As illustrated in my mother's retelling of a near death experience.
Despedida
by Alexandra Cuesta, 16mm film, 2013, 10 minutes
Shot in Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles, this transitory neighborhood resonates with the poetry of local resident Mapkaulu Roger Nduku. Verses about endings, looking and passing through open up the space projected. A string of tableaus gather a portrait of place and compose a goodbye letter to an ephemeral home.
Sea of Vapors
by Sylvia Schedelbauer, digital, 2014, 5 minutes
A cascade of images cut frame by frame flow into an allegory of the lunar cycle.
El Mito de Narciso mujeres que hablan con su propia imagen
by Narcisa Hirsch, digital, 1974/1979/2005, 20 minutes
This film is a testimony of the project "Women who speak with their own image." It began in Buenos Aires in 1974, continued in 1979, and finishes in 2005 at the same place.
Kids Playing in Front Yard
by Rachael Guma, digital, 2006, 7 minutes
A deeply personal film re-edited with footage from my aunt’s home movies. Bird eggs hatch, my cousin learns to ride a bike, and the adults in my life invade the world of childhood innocence.
Crowdog
by Vanessa Renwick, 16mm to digital, 1998, 7 minutes
An early encounter with Peter Mathiessen's 1983 book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse concerning the fallout of the FBI’s ‘Reign of Terror’ over the American Indian Movement led a teenaged filmmaker on a pilgrimage to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. This journal entry of a film describes a young artist in the midst of over two years of shoe-free peregrinations, with a spare, mesmerizing narration that reflects a landscape ranging from the slimy underbelly of dirty Chicago to a hitchhiker’s perch in the back of a dusty pickup truck. See the kindness of the older self who dares also to show us the convictions of our youth. Bare feet on a paved road, a white girl stands to one side of a white line, a wolf dog weaves and dances between.
Love and Numbers
by Thirza Cuthand, digital, 2004, 8 minutes
A Two Spirited woman surrounded by spy signals and psychiatric walls attempts to make sense of love, global paranoia, and her place in the history of colonialism. Spliced in between her monologues are the binary codes of all the psychiatric drugs she has taken.
From Sea to See (2015)
by Eve-Lauryn LaFountain, Super 8mm to digital, 2015, 8 minutes
Manifest Destiny claimed that all this land, known to the original peoples as Turtle Island, was free for the taking. European settler expansion to the west was inevitable. Outer space became the final frontier after recent conquests. Now even our space fantasies are dwindling. I set out to edit these small rolls of film together as a farewell to Ektachrome, a farewell to the last of Kodak’s color reversal films. It became a meditation on the legacy of Manifest Destiny and the greed of taking what cannot belong to anyone.
TRT: 86 mins
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Leslie Supnet is a contemporary experimental animator and filmmaker from the Filipino diaspora who creates media works that explore themes of loss, change and the passage of time. Using animation, live-action, found footage and material exploration, Supnet’s process is guided by lyricism and personal archeology. Leslie completed her MFA in Film at York University in 2016. She has taught animation in the community at various artist-run centres in Canada and through TIFF’s Reel Comfort program. Leslie is currently a Sessional Instructor at OCAD University.
Emily Van Loan is an experimental filmmaker and artist. They create diaristic, autobiographical works with the intention of fostering connection.
Paige Taul is an Oakland, CA native who received her B.A. in Studio Art with a concentration in cinematography from the University of Virginia and her M.F.A in Moving Image from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She currently resides in Chicago, IL.
Alexandra Cuesta is an Ecuadorean filmmaker whose films combine experimental film traditions along with documentary practices, and investigate the reciprocity of the gaze in time based representation. Her images often depart from the public sphere, and highlight the poetics of the common experience. Her work has been presented in a number of festivals, museums, galleries, and cultural institutions, such as the New York Film Festival, Cinema Du Réel, FIDMarseille, BFI London, Oberhausen, Courtisane, FICValdivia, Viennale, Anthology Film Archives, Image Forum Tokyo, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Palacio de Bellas Artes, Bienal de Arte Contemporáneo de Cuenca, Fronteira Festival Internacional Do Filme Documental E Experimental in Goiania- Brazil, Punto de vista, Festival de Nouveu Cinema, Art of the Real at the Lincoln Center, among others. She received her MFA in Film and Video from the California Institute of the Arts. In 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Based in Berlin, Germany. Sylvia Schedelbauer's films negotiate the space between broader historical narratives and personal, psychological realms mainly through poetic manipulations of found and archival footage.
Born in Berlin, Germany in 1928, Argentine by choice, Narcisa Hirsch is a filmmaker with a long career in experimental cinema. In the 60s and 70s she expanded her activity with the creation of installations, objects, performances, graffiti, urban interventions. In her works she exposes central themes such as love, birth, and death, or questions about the female condition, recreated through a particularly intimate language of images with marked visual and sound poetry. So far she has made more than 30 films in super 8, 16mm, and video, and they have taken on feature length, short, and documentary forms.
Rachael Guma is a filmmaker and sound artist currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Through her experiments with Super 8 film and analog sound, Rachael strives to create an engaging live viewing experience that embraces the idiosyncratic qualities of technology, while maintaining a hand-crafted approach to her output. Since graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute, her films have screened at the San Francisco Cinematheque, RX Gallery, Mono No Aware, Northern Flickers, UnionDocs, AXWFF, Black Maria, Echo Park Film Center and Microscope Gallery where she was invited to present her first solo show in 2013. In 2016-2017, Rachael participated in Dreamlands: Expanded, a series of expanded cinema events organized by Microscope Gallery in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of the exhibition “Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema & Art, 1905-2016”. In this series, she premiered a film, light, and sound composition REDNOWWONDER and provided live sound and additional visual support for a re-staging of Kurt Schwerdtfeger's 1922 “Reflektorische Farblichtspiele” (Reflecting Color-Light-Play). The latter of which she performed in 2019 at HKG in Berlin, Germany and the Paul Klee Museum in Bern, Switzerland for the traveling exhibition, Bauhaus Imaginista. Collaboration is integral to Rachael's creative process. As a member of Optipus Film Collective, she has performed live foley and record manipulations at the Kitchen, Participant Gallery, 2011 Index Festival, Roulette, the Museum of Art and Design (MAD), Morbid Anatomy Museum, Transient Visions, and Unseen Cinema. Rachael plays theremin for the sound collective, Underworld Oscillator Corporation, most recently performing a live score for the silent film version of The Phantom of the Opera (1925). She is also a founding member of the liquid light projection group, A Clockface Orange, who most recently performed Deliquescence for a live fvirtual audience for Orphans 2020. Her teaching experience includes introducing avant-garde film to at-risk teens at Reel Works, artist visits at Brooklyn College, University of Colorado, Boulder, Pratt Institute and Sarah Lawrence, animation, sound for film and theremin workshops at the Children's Museum of the Arts, stop motion animation workshops at BRIC, and analog film workshops for Mono No Aware.
Vanessa Renwick is an artist by nature, not by stress of research. They put scholars to rout by embracing nature's teaching problems that have fretted trained minds. Working in experimental and poetic documentary forms, their iconoclastic work embodies their interest in landscape and transformation, and relationships between bodies and landscapes, and all sorts of borders. They have been a singular voice in the experimental cinema for over 20 years. Eschewing an allegiance to any one medium or form, Renwick builds authentic moving image works revealing an insatiable curiosity and unflinching engagement with the world around them. Often focusing their lens on nature, freedom and the locales of their adopted home, the Pacific Northwest, Renwick uses avant-garde formal elements to explore radical politics and environmental issues. An artist who often self-distributes, their screening history reads as a map of independent cinema worldwide. They have screened work in hundreds of venues internationally, institutional and not, including The Museum of Modern Art, Light Industry, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Art Basel, Oberhausen, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Centre Pompidou, Bread and Puppet Theater and True/False Film Festival, among many others. Vanessa Olivia Renwick is a non-binary artist of Scottish and German descent, born on the traditional and unceded territory of the Illiniwek in what is now known as Chicago, Illinois. They live and work as an uninvited guest on the traditional territory of the Chinookan peoples, now known as Portland, Oregon.
Thirza Jean Cuthand was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada in 1978, and grew up in Saskatoon. Since 1995 she has been making short experimental narrative videos and films about sexuality, madness, Queer identity and love, and Indigeneity, which have screened in festivals internationally, including the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, Mix Brasil Festival of Sexual Diversity in Sao Paolo, ImagineNATIVE in Toronto, Ann Arbour Film Festival, Images in Toronto, Berlinale in Berlin, and Oberhausen International Short Film Festival. Her work has also exhibited at galleries including the Remai in Saskatoon, The National Gallery in Ottawa, and The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. They completed their Bachelor of Fine Arts majoring in Film and Video at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2005, and her Masters of Arts in Media Production at X University in 2015. In 1999 she was an artist in residence at Videopool and Urban Shaman in Winnipeg, where she completed Through The Looking Glass. In 2012 she was an artist in residence at Villa K. Magdalena in Hamburg, Germany, where she completed Boi Oh Boi. In 2015 they were commissioned by ImagineNATIVE to make 2 Spirit Introductory Special $19.99. She was also commissioned to make Thirza Cuthand Is An Indian Within The Meaning Of The Indian Act by VIMAF and Queer Arts Festival in 2017. In 2018 they were commissioned to make the video Reclamation by Cinema Politica in the Documentary Futurism Next 150 project. In the summer of 2016 she began working on a 2D video game called A Bipolar Journey based on her experience learning and dealing with her bipolar disorder. It showed at ImagineNATIVE and was finished in 2020. She has also written three feature screenplays and has performed at Live At The End Of The Century in Vancouver, Queer City Cinema’s Performatorium in Regina, and 7a*11d in Toronto. In 2017 she won the Hnatyshyn Foundation’s REVEAL Indigenous Art Award. She is a Whitney Biennial 2019 artist. She is a non-binary Butch boy who uses She/They pronouns. They are of Plains Cree and Scots descent, a member of Little Pine First Nation, and currently resides in Toronto, Canada.
Eve-Lauryn Little Shell LaFountain (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) is a multimedia artist, filmmaker, and educator. Her work explores identity, history, indigenous futurism, feminism, ghosts, magic, and her mixed Native American and Jewish heritage through lens based media and installations. She is a Sundance New Frontier and Indigenous MacArthur Fellow, was a Flaherty Film Seminar Fellow, and has received support for her work from the Mike Kelley Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation, Cousin Collective, and more. She was also an Interactive Storyteller for Tribeca Film Institute. LaFountain was born into a family of artists and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is part of the Echo Park Film Center operational co-op, and she teaches experimental film and photography at the California Institute of the Arts, where she is also the Assistant Director of Admissions. She holds a BA from Hampshire College, and a dual MFA in Film & Video and Photography & Media from CalArts.
Flaherty NYC Programmers
Kelsey White Born in Los Angeles when Saturn and Uranus were conjunct with the Sun at the Ascendant, Kelsey White is currently a film projectionist living in Brooklyn, New York. Though much of her time is given towards showing films to the cinephiles in New York City, she continues to pursue a polyphonic set of creative interests, including writing, music-making, and filming. She is a new mother who likes to observe the changing seasons and listen to small talk on street corners, and she attempts to practice non-judgment towards all beings, remaining open to the unknown, while carefully paying attention to the complexity, the irony and pain, as well as the beauty of existence.
L u m i a (818) 514 - 4601