Upcoming Screenings Online/Week of July 19th

Top Picks for Art Online Week of July 19th

Broadcast: Alternative Meanings in Film & Video, Chapter Three by Various Artists
Gagosian/Online
June 30-July 20, 2020/Free

This new installment of the Gagosian gallery's ongoing film series, which has been unfurling throughout lockdown, is just as eclectic as its predecessors. Timothy Leary's iconic “turn on, tune in, drop out" is the loose, guiding thematic framework for the series, a phrase whose meaning skews somewhat during virus culture. Works including Sterling Ruby's Hiker (1993) (with an anxiety-producing voyeuristic screech) and Man Ray's classic cinépoéme Emak Bakia (1926) (an example of the dawning post-WWI avant-garde film movement whose title translates to either "Leave me Alone" or "Give Peace") are just some of the masterpieces on offer. Be warned: Steven Perrino's "turned on" Guitar Grind (1995) is loud af when it begins. 

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Short New Play Festival: Private Lives w/Jeremy O. Harris, Theresa Rebeck + Others
Red Bull Theater/Live Stream
July 20, 2020/7:30pm (EDT)/Free, donations welcome

A series of ten-minute plays written by emerging playwrights will be presented online under the theme Private Lives, inspired by Noël Coward's comedy of the same name. Two pieces commissioned by Jeremy O. Harris, the dapper Yale grad behind the award-winning Slave Play and more recently co-writer of Janicza Bravo's much anticipated A24 film Zola, and Theresa Rebeck "the most Broadway-produced female playwright of our time" anchor this evening of performances alongside work from six chosen newcomers selected from over 500 submissions. The lineup includes Matthew Park's Plague Year which focuses on a Medieval family in quarantine during the bubonic plague and Mallory Jane Weiss's Evermore Unrest featuring a lone woman penning a letter to her ex-boyfriend from her honeymoon suite. 
 

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Vintage: Families of Value (1995) by Thomas Allen Harris & 
Black Families Through Queer Eyes Panel w/Thomas Allen Harris, Shari Frilot & Rajendra Roy
Bisexual.org, Black Public Media + Others/Online Film Screening & Panel
Film: July 21- July 23, 2020/12pm (EDT) 
Panel: July 22, 2020/6pm (EDT)/ Free, RSVP 

Thomas Allen Harris' 1995 debut feature Vintage: Families of Value is a collective experimental documentary. Shot over five years, the film takes the lives of three sets of Black Queer siblings and asks them to share their familial relationships from their own individual perspectives, including that of the director and his younger brother. What results is a kaleidoscopic approach to autobiographical visual storytelling through a range of techniques-- a home movie media collage. For the film's 25th Anniversary, a panel featuring the Director, Chief Curator of Sundance's New Frontier program Shari Frilot and MoMA Film Curator Rajendra Roy will "place Vintage within the broader contexts of 1990's Black Queer experimental filmmaking and current activism."

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Last Light (2020) by Carmen Argote
Hammer Museum/Online Screening + Q&A
July 21, 2020/6pm (PDT)/Free, RSVP

Carmen Argote's photo/video piece Last Light emerges as a direct response to  Covid-19 and its discontents. Argote captures the bigger and smaller pictures all at once by looking both inward and outward. Through moving and still images she roams the desolate streets of L.A., her current home, exposing her thoughts and visions. As mentioned in her artist statement: "I explore notions of home and place. I respond to architecture and site to reflect on personal histories and on my own immigrant experience. My practice uses the act of inhabiting as a starting point, working within a space and its cultural, economic, and personal context as a material. I work at a human scale and in relationship to how my body inhabits space." A Q&A will follow the screening with the always brilliant Erin Christovale. 

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Consensual Hallucinations: Early Online Writing from the Thing BBS Archives &

Phantom Threads: Restoring The Thing BBS

Rhizome/First Look: New Art Online 

Consensual Hallucinations/July 21, 2020/2pm (EDT)

Phantom Threads/July 23, 2020/2pm (EDT)/ Free, RSVP

The closest I came to The Thing BBS experience was mid-2000s Williamsboard, a place for the horny gentrifiers, aspiring DJs, trolls and "artists" of Williamsburg, Brooklyn to convene to find jobs, noods and apartments. The Thing BBS came from a much more idyllic time of the internet taking advantage of the sudden global era of near-instant communication to define a new, sprawling definition of artistic community. The site became a space for creatives to engage in discussions of cultural theory, muse on artistic practice and share work all through the slow modems of the day. Just as interestingly, there has been a more recent push to begin to preserve this, and other, web-art outfits and pieces for art history's sake. This two-part event will look at the writing and creation of The Thing BBS and also the process of its preservation. I hope no one archived Williamsboard.

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Idiot Prayer by Nick Cave (musician)
Alexandra Palace/Pre-recorded livestream performance
July 23, 2020/Various time zones/$20
  

The second Nick Cave album I bought was The Boatman's Call, a solemn, quiet, dark, brooding, sparse work that completely reframed what my teenage brain thought music had to be (Black Hair breaks down the pieces of melody and meter into wisps of repetition, Idiot Prayer a pulse-like dream pushing the wayward ballad forward with dispassionate grace). More recently, Cave has been using his writing to speak eloquently, honestly, hopefully through his online collaborative platform The Red Hand Files. After having to cancel his live tour, this alternative pre-recorded solo show will stream live, staggered across different time zones to bring his melancholy love to his admirers. Side note: The equally prolific Susie Cave has been selling her delicate, decadent The Vampire's Wife face masks online, freshness and beauty folded in their neo-Victorian gothic ruffles.

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Landfall (2020) by Cecilia Aldarondo

Philadelphia Latino Film Festival, co-presented with ADOCPR, Philly Boricuas and Third Horizon Film Festival/ Online Stream, Q+A, DJ Set

July 25/7pm (EDT)/Free, Taking Donations

Firelight Media has been doing an unbelievable series called Beyond Resilience that explores the ways in which film seeks to find the "strength and expression through the collective" especially in times of deep crisis. The entire series has been beyond inspiring to listen and learn from. One of these events is where I first heard Cecilia Aldarondo speak about her film Landfall, a documentary that was filmed in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane María. The film looks at the natural disaster but also other, under-reported disasters that flooded the area (namely the economic devastation and the opportunistic outsiders descending upon the region) and also the positive, communal aspects of rebuilding and rethinking-- ideas with a new dimensionality given the past few months. The clip from the film shown at Firelight's zoom roundtable was an intimate, knowing cinéma vérité, a camera that melted into the scene with an easy familiarity only found in expert filmmaking. Excited to see this and to support the many organizations coming together to present this Philadelphia Premiere.

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