The  Friendship  State: Texas  Experimental  Filmmakers

Lyndsay Bloom    Caroline Koebel    Jennifer Lane    Kelly Sears    Scott Stark

Monday, November 5, 2012, 7PM, Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn 11221, Admission $6

I conceived this program in response to pondering upcoming travels back to NYC and the context in which I'd like to screen my work now that I live in Austin rather than there. Leveling all the scary stuff about my new state is what you learn from the inside, not the least of which is that the motto of Texas is "friendship." In my three years here, I have been sustained and inspired by the presence of a range of film and video artists. The Friendship State embraces the dialog between makers and comprises five artists, including me, from diverse points of Texas—each engaging select tactics to reveal, negate and ultimately transcend moving image boundaries.   (Caroline Koebel)
Fawn (JL, 2003, 16mm on video, color, sound, 5:00)
A nude, androgynous woman and a wild deer engage in a subtle pas de deux in the rigidly designed interior of a suburban house.
Swoop (CK, 2012, Version 2, miniDV & Super 8 on video, color/b&w, silent, 7:30)
Inspired by a colony of cliff swallows nesting under a freeway in Austin, Swoop considers human-animal interactions through optical rhythms and flight patterns. Birds—cliff swallows as well as thousands of purple martins on their migration path—collide with new construction to nowhere.
Traces (SS, 2012, 35mm on video, color, sound, 7:00)
Worldly surfaces, shifting shadows and overlooked patterns: a series of short 35mm films generated from digital still images and printed onto movie film. The top and bottom half of each image alternate in the projector gate, arranged in a dizzying array of rhythms and patterns. The images also bleed onto the optical soundtrack area of the film, generating their own unexpected sounds.
Barton Springs Lake Travis (LB, 2011, hand processed 16mm, color, silent, 2:30)
Water scenes, Austin, Texas.
Kiss (LB, 2012, hand processed 16mm, b&w, silent, 1:31)
Underwater shot at Film Farm, Mount Forest, Ontario.
Once It Started It Could Not End Otherwise (KS, 2011, video, color/b&w, sound, 7:30)
An animated horror film constructed from the candid photos and handwritten messages of discarded high school yearbooks. As an unknown force seeps into the walls of the school, the student body is consumed one extra curricular activity at a time.
Clouds (JL, 2010, HD video, color, sound, 8:00)
An experimental nature film about the water cycle of planet earth. Mirroring the style of an educational film, images of the unique and varied cloud formations of far West Texas are accompanied by voice-over narration that could have originated from another time and place.
Repeat Photography & the Albedo Effect (CK, 2008, video, b&w, sound 8:12)
Intermixes unlikely suspects to reflect upon the impact of global warming on glaciers. Boxing scenes from Scorsese's Raging Bull are re-shot with a Bolex 16mm camera and then hand processed and juxtaposed against NPR reportage and artist Katie Paterson's audio project. Part 1 of Flicker On Off.
The Drift (KS, 2007, digital video, color, sound, 8:20)
A mysterious disappearance on a 1960s space journey launches the counter-culture revolution, the government blocks contraband radio broadcasts, and American fervor for conquering space results in tragic ends. Psychedelic Rock, wayward space transmission, happenings, scientific research, the space race, high hopes, failed dreams, and bodily levitation all come together in the story of The Drift.
Good and Gone (LB, 2012, hand processed 16mm on video, b&w, silent, 10:11)
Women wonders wander water, shot at Film Farm, Mount Forest, Ontario.
Hotel Cartograph (SS, 1983, 16mm, color, sound, 11:00)
A camera mounted on a movable cart, pointing down at the floor, passes over a seemingly endless succession of gaudy carpets and surfaces in a single shot through a major hotel. The movements across the 2-dimensional space, and in and out of elevators through 3-dimensional space, suggest a conceptual map of the visible environment, which is perhaps drawn by the camera itself.
LYNDSAY BLOOM received her BFA at the Cooper Union in New York City and currently works out of Texas where she has been shooting and processing her own 16mm and super 8 films since 2009. In addition to being an artist-educator in Texas public schools, she has worked on films with Jennifer Reeves and Winsome Brown, taught photography at Camp Stanton Meadows in Virginia, and joined grassroots organization Lo Curativo in teaching and performing puppet shows for youth in Buratovich, Argentina. She was a 2012 resident at Film Farm in Mount Forest, Ontario.
CAROLINE KOEBEL is an Austin-based filmmaker and writer on faculty at Transart Institute (New York-Berlin). Her experimental films and art videos have played internationally, with recent retrospectives at Festival Cine//B (Santiago, Chile) and Directors Lounge (Berlin, Germany). She has published in Jump Cut, Brooklyn Rail, Afterimage, Art Papers, and elsewhere. She holds a BA in Film Studies from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Visual Arts from UC San Diego. www.carolinekoebel.com
JENNIFER LANE was born in Dallas in August of 1968 and currently lives and works in Marfa. She studied art at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Her films, videos, and drawings have been exhibited at the Castillo Di Rivoli in Turin, the ZKM Center for Experimental Media and Technology in Karlsruhe, the Royal College of Art in London, the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Miami International Film Festival, the Austin Film Society, and on Japanese television. www.jenniferlanestudio.com
KELLY SEARS is a Houston-based animator and filmmaker, whose award-winning collage films draw on documentary, science fiction and experimental cinema and combine traditional stop motion animation with digital compositing techniques. She reworks popular media artifacts to create new readings of the nation's past and forge connections with contemporary history. Her many exhibition venues include MoMA, The Hammer Museum, Light Industry, Sundance Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Black Maria Film Festival. She teaches classes on experimental animation, found footage video and collaborative arts practices at the University of Houston. www.kellysears.com
SCOTT STARK has made over 75 films and videos since the early 1980s, and has created numerous installations, performances and photo-collages. His work has shown nationally and internationally in venues as diverse as New York's Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Cinematheque, the Film Festival Rotterdam, and the Tokyo Image Forum. His 16mm film Angel Beach was invited into the 2002 Whitney Biennial, and in 2007 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the webmaster for Flicker, the web resource for experimental film and video. www.scottstark.com
Approximate length: 77 minutes.
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