Works by Quenton Baker, Fatma Belkis, Arden Carlson, Roland Dahwen, Lourdes Figueroa & Peggy Peralta, Tiffany Jiang, Naima Lowe, Sarah Rushford, Tobi Springer
Curated by Marilyn Freeman, Rana San and Chelsea Werner-Jatzke
Marilyn Freeman and Anne de Marcken in attendance
Microscope is very pleased to present a screening of films in connection with the newly launched “Good Symptoms: A Serial Anthology of Time-Based Disturbances,” a project by independent press The 3rd Thing that every month releases a selection of videos pushing “the language of poetry, essay and hybrid literature off the page and onto the screen.”
The hour-long program — curated by Marilyn Freeman, Rana San and Chelsea Werner-Jatzke — features nine short videos, mostly made in 2022-2023, five of which are screening for the first time before an audience.
From the curators:
“Troubling the boundaries between cinema and literature, Good Symptom: A Serial Anthology of Time-Based Disturbances pushes the language and form of poetry, essay, correspondence, autobiography, manifesto, love letters, and hybrid literary work off the page and onto the screen. A singular collection of short films to be released over the course of 12 monthly online installments, Good Symptom is produced and distributed by The 3rd Thing – an independent press dedicated to publishing necessary alternatives, and invests fully in the conviction that necessary alternatives arise from artists who live and work outside dominant culture–queer, Black and Indigenous people, other people of color, and people living with disabilities. Find out more about Good Symptom HERE. https://the3rdthing.press/product/goodsymptom/“
Curator Marilyn Freeman and The 3rd Thing’s publisher Anne de Marcken will be in attendance to introduce the event and available for a Q&A following the screening.
About the artists
Quenton Baker is a poet, educator, and Cave Canem fellow. Their current focus is black interiority and the afterlife of slavery. Their work has appeared in The Offing, Jubilat, Vinyl, The Rumpus and elsewhere. They are a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and the recipient of the 2018 Arts Innovator Award from Artist Trust. They were a 2019 Robert Rauschenberg Artist in Residence and a 2021 NEA Fellow. They are the author of we pilot the blood (The 3rd Thing, 2021) and ballast (Haymarket Books, 2023).
Fatma Belkıs was born in Antalya in 1985. She now lives in İstanbul. She is interested in narratives of individuals going through a transformation, specifically the ones who prefer not to do this alone. She works with text, video, and printed matter. While problematizing structures built on friendship and comradery, she focuses on contracts and the breaches of these contracts regarding these structures. Her works were shown in İstanbul and Sharjah Biennials and in institutions such as SALT, İstanbul Modern, DEPO, nGbK, Tensta Konsthall. The films she directed were shown at international film festivals in Turkey and abroad.
Arden Carlson works across mediums including video & performance. Arden’s concern is their practice, exploring how care is enacted in a body of work and how it reaches beyond, connecting to embodied experiences or the imaginary. The scope of Arden's creative practice has been shaped by their experience as a queer individual in the rural south region of the United States.
Roland Dahwen is a writer, visual artist, performer, and filmmaker. He studied literature and translation before starting to work in documentaries. At the age of twenty, he made his first short film, There are no birds in the nests of yesterday, about the whistling language of the Canary Islands. He then worked at a documentary film company, helping to make and distribute films about immigration and citizenship. After making short films and video installations for several years, he directed his first feature film, Borrufa. Roland Dahwen was born in Brattleboro, Vermont, US and currently lives in Portland, Oregon. His primary hobby is gardening, with a particular affinity for palms and cycads.
Peggy Peralta & Lourdes Figueroa are partners in love, life, makers of visual art and proud momma's of Agnés a red nose pit bull named after filmmaker hero Agnés Varda. Peggy, Lourdes & Agnés live and work in Oakland, California. Together in July of 2020 they launched Bilbil Projects– a space where poem & film come together.
Tiffany Jiang is an award-winning Chinese-American filmmaker who gravitates towards stories about identity struggles, cultural taboos, and personal traumas. Tiffany is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Media Studies at The New School.
Naima Lowe is Black queer disabled writer and artist who creates films, performances and texts using improvisational and collaborative strategies. With a BA from Brown University and MFA from Temple University, Naima has exhibited at Anthology Film Archive, Wing Luke Museum, MiX Experimental Film Festival, National Queer Art Festival and the Henry Art Gallery. Naima has been an artist in residence at Millay Colony, Vermont Studio Center, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. She’s currently a Mid America Arts Alliance Interchange Artist Fellow, recipient of the Mid America Arts Alliance Artistic Innovation Award, and recipient of the Jazz Road Creative Residency. Naima resides in Tulsa, within the Muscogee Creek Nation Reservation, where she spends her time being free and talking to animals.
Sarah Rushford is an interdisciplinary writer, and video artist originally from Massachusetts and living in Portland, Oregon. She has shown interdisciplinary work widely over the past twenty-six years, and has a forthcoming solo exhibition at Rubus Discolor Project. She has had recent solo and group exhibitions at Grapefruits and Carnation Contemporary in Portland, OR. Rushford is an MFA Candidate in Visual Studies, an interdisciplinary program at Pacific Northwest College of Art, and her poems and text-art have appeared in the literary journals Houseguest, Tuesday: An Art Project, and Mother, Mother. She has completed residencies at Union Docs, Takt Kunstprojektraum, Berlin, and ArtFarm, Nebraska, and she was recently a Co-Director at Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn.
About the curators & organizers
Media artist, writer, contemplative guide and independent scholar, Marilyn Freeman works at the intersections of reckoning and resiliency, queerness and film, and contemplative, creative and social art practices. They are author of The Illuminated Space: A Personal Theory and Contemplative Practice of Media Art (The 3rd Thing, 2020) and creator of Cinema Divina—short films made through and for guided contemplative practice. Their text and media arts essays have been published in or at The Fourth Genre, Ninth Letter, TriQuarterly, Blackbird, Rolling Stone and Abbey of the Arts. Their films are screened on PBS and in galleries, spirituality centers and festivals worldwide. More at marilynfreeman.com.
Rana San is an intermedia artist, curator, and night dreamer pondering language and lineage, intimacy and interdependence. Her curatorial and creative practice centers experimental and analog approaches to storytelling through film, writing, and movement presented on screen and stage. She is co-founder and co-director of the annual Cadence Video Poetry Festival.
Chelsea Werner-Jatzke is a writer and arts organizer exploring the liminal spaces of the literary arts. She is the author of 3 chapbooks and is co-founder and co-director of the annual Cadence Video Poetry Festival.
The 3rd Thing is an independent press dedicated to publishing necessary alternatives. They publish projects representing in form, content and perspective their interdisciplinary, intersectional priorities. They think of each project in the cohort as a break in the stockade—a way out of the settlement and into the wilderness. Often their books are the result of an artist working in a non-dominant discipline—a playwright writes a book of poems, a theater-maker writes a book of essays, a filmmaker writes a book of theory…. And while their emphasis is on print traditions, the projects may take any number of forms: books, broadsides, performances, installations, colloquia, video anthologies, etc. The 3rd Thing publishes work primarily by artists and writers who identify as members of traditionally marginalized groups, primarily Indigenous people, womxn, queer people and people of color. Learn more at the3rdthing.press.
Anne de Marcken is an interdisciplinary writer, artist and publisher of The 3rd Thing. She is author of the novel It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over (New Directions, Fitzcarraldo Editions and Giramondo, 2024) and the lyric novella, The Accident: An Account (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020). Her work across disciplines has garnered numerous awards including the 2022 Novel Prize, an Artist Trust Fellowship and a Millay Colony Fellowship. She lives at the southernmost tip of the Salish Sea on the unceded land of the Coast Salish people, where she works as Editor and Publisher of the independent press, The 3rd Thing.