Upcoming Screenings Online/Week of June 28th

Top Picks for Art Online Week of June 28th

It's in the Game '17 or Mirror Gag for Vitrine and Protection (2017) by Sondra Perry
Hammer Museum/Online (Eventbrite)
June 30, 2020@5pm PDT/Free
Screening and Q+A

Sondra Perry's twin brother Sandy was an NCAA Basketball player. A version of him appeared in a videogame without his knowledge or consent. A meditation on identity, technology and "ownership," Perry's It's in the Game '17 breaks down flat digital space, playing with its dimensionality and making one question their understanding of perspective. The film moves between different visual themes including family photos of the twins growing up while three dimensional, chroma-key blue artifacts float in the foreground. Another theme involves cell-phone video of the twins as they encounter the versions of history displayed at The Met and The British Museum. The piece reminds that the co-opting of images and identities isn't a new phenomenon but that the digital space has only worked to confuse and subvert ideas of ownership, self, subject and object: everything and everyone can be chroma-keyed out or photoshopped on a whim, or, more frighteningly, with exacting purpose. It's impossible to distill this piece into its many layers and visions, it is a piece of contemporary work that symbolizes so much of the digital meets physical moment, of the boundaries and infiniteness that are exhilarating and suffocating all with a slight sense of humor. I really love this one, check it out!

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Strain Andromeda The (1992) by Anne McGuire
Lux /Screening Room (Eventbrite)
July 2, 2020@6pm BST/Free
Screening via link for 48hrs prior to Q+A

London based Lux is a non-profit that "supports and promotes artists' moving image practices and the ideas that surround them." (They also happened to be a sponsor of the 2019 Oberhausen Seminar that I was lucky enough to be a part of). Their response to Covid-19 has been the Screening Room series which will kick off this week with Anne McGuire's Strain Andromeda The. The film takes Robert Wise's 1971 film adaptation of Michael Crichton's novel The Andromeda Strain, a film whose plot revolves fittingly around a deadly alien contagion that nearly wipes out a small town in New Mexico, and reverses it via her signature "disaster deconstruction" technique. McGuire's version begins with the last shot and slowly inches backward-- not in reverse but in measured moments: answers to questions precede the questions, consequences come before actions. Other online offerings of screening and events via Lux are also worth noting be sure to explore! 

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Salacia (2019) by Tourmaline
MoMA/Artist Project Online
June 26@8pm-July 6, 2020
Thanks @oumaaaa_for link!

As Tourmaline mentions in the introduction to this screening, Salacia deals in a few different histories of New York City including the story of black trans sex worker Mary Jones who was born in 1803 and later imprisoned at Sing Sing for larceny, to the story of Seneca Village, a community of black landowners in the mid-19th Century wiped out by the fear of local politicians: the village was taken via eminent domain for the building of Central Park. The film collapses histories, a culmination of the "freedom dreams" of many, an assertion of existence, and perhaps reclamation, ringing out in the final, haunting repeated line (no spoilers, watch it). The surrealistic portrait is shot on 16mm, the grainy beauty of the film is shown through split-screen images and overlays that allow for different realities to co-exist, a changing of perspective that further destabilizes memory/history/place/possession. In the film's intro, Tourmaline reminds that New York City was built by the free labor of prisoners and, like the other histories present in the film, watchers are reminded of the power embodied in these invisible ghosts of the city brought to life in this powerful, evocative, life-affirming film.

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National Anthem (2019) by Kota Ezawa
Whitney Museum of American Art/Whitney Screens
July 3@7pm-July 5, 2020@10pm EDT

Ezawa's watercolor animation looks like it might float off the paper that it is so delicately crafted upon, a fitting embodiment of an event that is both heavy and uplifting. The film uses broadcast images of San Francisco 49er's Colin Kapernick as he knelt during the pre-game National Anthem in 2016, an act in response to racial inequality and the ongoing injustices enacted upon black people and people of color by white law enforcement. His action caused massive outrage and career upheaval, responses that are further proof of the structures of power the nation has been trapped within. Ezawa's work, as in previous pieces, looks at how events are represented through media often by using things like existing news footage or Hollywood scenes and transforming them into a more graphical form, questioning the truth and essence in forms of representation. Though presented digitally, the handmade nature of the watercolors is full, a human connection emerges from the images along with a reminder that real people are behind all sorts of creativity and progression but also a reminder that real people can be behind all sorts of destruction and pain.

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Please send recs for upcoming weeks to: donnak3[at]gmail[dot]com