Placenta

MJ Golzari | Iran

Year: 2023

Run time: 4:00 min.

Synopsis:
The ‘‘Placenta’’ film is an abstract interpretation of the concept of life. In the bed of life, we are standing in the infinity of time and space. Evanescently, we look at the human who is struggling to persevere. The meaning of life is to bear. A collection of feelings, memories, events, and dreams. This load is the only possession of a person during his lifetime. The film is centered on a current gender viewpoint that, in some ways, highlights gender disparities, not just in rural religious environments but also in an idea that is applicable everywhere. The state of struggling women in specific regions.  the idea of freedom and limitation for people living under the strict regulations of despotic tradition.

Bio:
MJ Golzari (b. Iran) currently lives and studies in the United States.  He is a Photographer, filmmaker, writer, and naturalist.  Through experiences, historical collective moments, elements, and imagination, his works seek to evoke thoughts, feelings, and emotions that delve deeply into the essence of "humanity." His works reintroduce us to our immediate surroundings and beyond by penetrating our everyday life experiences and the meanings we know. He describes this process of getting reacquainted as an opportunity to become more truthful and precise.  The main theme of his most recent movie, "Placenta," is the force that makes people bear a heavy load of humanity while they daydream about imaginary journeys. We carry with us a multitude of memories, dreams, regrets, and other emotions that have shaped who we are now.

Ana Mendieta might

Jaewook Lee | US

Year: 2023

Run time: 13:00 min.

Synopsis:
"Ana Mendieta might (2023)" is a 3D animated film paying tribute to the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta. This imaginative work explores an alternate reality where Mendieta's journey in performance art extends to an extraterrestrial setting, depicting her giving birth on a distant planet.  The film takes viewers through a reimagined path of Mendieta's artistic endeavors, set against the exotic landscapes of another world. Each scene, rich with natural elements, becomes a dynamic stage for her earth-body art performances. These vivid portrayals honor Mendieta's groundbreaking methods and reflect the depths of her emotional experiences, offering an immersive glimpse into her visionary artistry.

Bio:
Jaewook Lee crafts 3D/CGI animation, AR, VR, video, and installations, re-envisioning the connection between humans and nature for artistic inspiration.  Lee participated in events such as the Montreal International Animation Film Festival (2023), ARKO Art & Tech Festival: Nothing Makes Itself at Arko Art Center in Seoul (2021), SACO9 Contemporary Art Festival in Chile (2020), Mindful Joint at Art Sonje Center in Seoul (2017), and the Hypnotic Show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2017), among others. He's also been featured at venues like Santa Fe Art Institute, the Hong-Gah Museum in Taiwan, the Total Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, and the Museo Juan Manuel Blanes in Montevideo. His achievements include a feature in Sculpture Magazine (May 2017) and a presence in permanent collections at the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art and the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts. Lee's next solo exhibition is set for February 2024 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei.   Lee earned MFAs from Carnegie Mellon University and the School of Visual Arts. He has taught at the University of Chicago, SVA, and SUNY Old Westbury. Currently, Lee serves as an Associate Professor of New Media Art at Northern Arizona University.

Website

Half Life

Laura Iancu | US

Year: 2023

Run time: 4:00 min.

Synopsis:
Different worlds at different time scales.

Bio: Iancu is a visual artist working primarily in experimental video forms and immersive 3D animation & gaming, with an expanded practice of installation and photography. Originally from Romania, she has been teaching, and making images in the US for more a decade. Currently Laura is an assistant professor of film production at Virginia Tech, School of Performing Arts.  Thematically she works around issues of ecology, ethnography, civic and political resistance under oppressive regimes of power and forms of humor as subversion mechanisms for prescriptive discourses and representations. Her work originates from puzzling together all the hints of the world, the gestural intertextuality, the perceptive and surface qualities of objects, geographical mappings, aspects of sound art, critical theory, poetry, magic realism, pop/internet culture, dance, gardening and the myriad mutations of emerging moving image technologies, including the rise in Generative AI technologies. 

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Parallel Botany

Magdalena Bermudez | US

Year: 2023

Run time: 11:08 min.

Synopsis:
Still lives of real fruit meet botanical illustrations of plant galls to expose the paradox of dissection: each time we cut something in two, we merely create a new exterior.

Bio:
Magdalena Bermudez (she/her) is a filmmaker and educator whose practice examines the entangled relationships between people, animals, and technologies through essayistic film and video works. Her work has screened internationally at film festivals including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Antimatter [Media Art], Athens International Film + Video Festival, BIDEODROMO International Experimental Film and Video Festival, Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival, Black Maria Film Festival, and the Festival of (In)appropriation. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Film and Video at Hampshire College.

Expansion

Amanda VanValkenburg | US

Year: 2023

Run time: 5:00 min.

Synopsis:
This is a visual investigation of proliferation, growth through repetition and accumulation. Continuous expansion and endless repetition seem to be permanent fixtures of contemporary life, and this video utilizes found footage and 3D software to play with loops, repetition, and nightmarish visions of replication. Inky digital blemishes bleed into the visual collages, and wash away the image as the expanding “carchitecture” inevitably collapses. 

Bio:
Amanda VanValkenburg is a visual artist using a combination of traditional and digital techniques to explore contemporary anxiety and digitally mediated interactions between the past and future. She received her BFA in Painting/Drawing /Sculpture at Brigham Young University, studied digital media at Hochschule für Künste Bremen, and received her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Film/Video/New Media/Animation. She currently teaches at Northern Illinois University as an Assistant Professor of Time Arts and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as an instructor in ACE and ECP programs. Her work has been exhibited in the MCA, Elmhurst Museum, Mana Contemporary, Woman Made Gallery, 6018 North Gallery, LeRoy Neiman Center, and screened at the Gene Siskel Theater, Nightingale Cinema, Links Hall, Filmfront, and the Chicago Digital Media Festival. She has completed residencies through High Concept Labs, Oxbow, and Ragdale.

Website

Ablation

Jacklyn Brickman | US

Year: 2023

Run time: 1:12 min.

Synopsis:
Ablation is an experimental video filmed with a macro lens inside a vintage icebox; A conflation of the loss of ice and snow from a glacier system with that of a common domestic microclimate.

Bio:
Jacklyn Brickman is a visual artist and educator whose work entangles science fact with fiction to address social and environmental concerns by employing natural entities, processes, and technology. Her work spans installation, video, and performance, with a special interest in cross-disciplinary collaboration and social engagement. Fellowships include The National Academy of Sciences, Chaire arts et sciences, Jentel Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and Erb Family Foundation. She has exhibited her work internationally. Brickman resides in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the ancestral and contemporary territory of the Council of the Three Fires – the Ojibwe, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi. Indigenous nations of the Great Lakes region are also known as the Anishinaabe. She is an Assistant Professor of Kinetic Imaging at Western Michigan University.

Website

Liminal

Scott Turri | US

Year: 2024

Run time: 10:26 min.

Bio:
For the last 20 years, Turri’s process has entailed exploring the relationship between digital and analog, providing a treasure trove of material with which to work. An avid collector and maker, having amassed a substantial archive of photographs, drawings, and digital imagery, he mines this archive when making his paintings and animations. His work engages cycles of behavior by embracing the repetitive nature of existence. It shifts between external and internal stimuli, focusing on imagery and ideas about home, place, and ritual within a nonlinear framework.  Hailing from suburban Philadelphia, where he spent his formative years, Turri now calls Pittsburgh home. Along with his art-making habit, he is also a self-taught drummer and has written for New Art Examiner, BOMB Magazine, and Afterimage. Turri also holds a Teaching Associate Professor position in the Studio Arts Department at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently represented by James Gallery.

Website

ywnhx

Nate Dorr | US

Year: 2024

Run time: 2:16 min.

Synopsis:
We have intervened in the landscape, reshaped and fragmented it. Yet it outlasts us.  Along the tide-swept shores and marshlands of a once-major city, people have gone but the artifacts of their era linger: rusted vehicles, heaped tires, crushed cement and glass. Old structures fall. Mechanical observation systems glitch. Wildlife roam these derelict lands anew. In the absence of human perception linear progressions falter and time moves in loops and skips, unpredictable. And over geologic time, even our most impervious creations will degrade and cease to exist.  ywnhx hovers in temporal uncertainty: told from beyond us yet amidst our physical memory, Composed of documentary footage and sound painstakingly processed to pry apart the assurances of recorded time -- nearly all images here were created by scanning and reconstructing video footage on a flatbed scanner as a diy slit scan -- ywnhx considers the legacy of our species from the vantage of an ambiguous post-Anthropocene.

Bio:
Nate Dorr is a photographer and filmmaker whose work traces the outer edges of the Anthropocene, from the sinking post-industrial shorelines of cities in flux to the data systems which we use to interpret our world and which could go on reinterpreting it long after we're gone. Based in Brooklyn, lapsed neuroscientist, habitual wanderer of transitory urban spaces.

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Chicago Loop: Wabash to State to Clark

Jeffrey Moser | US

Year: 2023

Run time: 4:45 min.

Synopsis:
This experimental film explores the visual architecture of the Chicago Urban landscape from the window of the CTA passenger trains.

Bio:
Jeffrey Moser was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and received his BA in Philosophy from Millersville University and his MFA from the University of Delaware. He has taught photography, visual literacy and culture, and interactive design in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Nebraska and is currently an Assistant Professor and coordinator of the Game Design and Interactive Media program at West Virginia University. Moser's video work has been screened at dozens of international film festivals. His video work has been screened at CURRENTS New Media (Santa Fe, NM), San Francisco Frozen Film Festival (CA), Vagrant Film Festival (touring in Eastern Europe), Milan Shorts (Italy), Hallucinea Film Festival (Paris), Luleå International Film Festival (Sweden), G Underground Film Festival (Australia), SoCal Film Awards (US), New York Short Film Tuesdays (NY), Screen Culture International Film Festival (London), SHORT to the Point (Romania), International Film Festival Akrobat (Saint-Petersburg), and the South Film and Arts Academy Festival (Chile).

Website

Incantations

Amanda Besl | US

Year: 2023

Run time: 4:55 min.

Synopsis:
A childhood spent in the forest. Spells passed down by fragile birds. This experimental work shifts from the familiar to the sublime within this landscape. Sound and imagery flutter in and out of the periphery suggesting the simultaneous quality of this space separated only by time. This film is dedicated to my parents and was filmed in their woods.

Bio:
Amanda Besl has shown widely in both Western New York and New York City, and in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Russia. Besl holds an MFA in Painting from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI and a BFA from SUNY Oswego. Her paintings are part of several notable private and public collections including the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo; Nichido Contemporary, Tokyo, Japan; the Burger Collection, Hong Kong and the Tullman Collection, Chicago. Besl works in the Arts Department at Nichols School in Buffalo as an Upper School Visual Arts teacher. She uses natural history as a platform to explore social issues and finds inspiration in the plants she obsessively tends, which also provide props for her current cyanotype inspired work. Besl is represented by Resource Art and her recent solo exhibition “Blue Mythologies” at The Raft of Sanity includes a foray into filmmaking.

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Selected Findings

Carey Lin & Gabriel Gilder | US

Year: 2023

Run time: 4:42 min.

Synopsis:
‘Selected Findings’ juxtaposes a variety of flora and fauna documented around the city of San Francisco. In the film, contrasting textures – raccoon fur, dewy plant life, gritty pavement, undulating water – and vibrant colors invite viewers to lose themselves in the miniature worlds created by close examination. The soundtrack – a dreamy duet between electric guitar and flugelhorn – oscillates between playful inquisitiveness and somber contemplation. The piece presents a meditation on the act of seeing, alternating between lingering on minute details and speeding through a blur of imagery. ‘Selected Findings’ experiments with various fanciful layouts, arranging visuals in overlays, picture-in-picture windows, and irregular grids.

Bio:
Carey Lin is a San Francisco-based visual artist. She earned her M.F.A. at the University of Chicago and her B.A. from New College of Florida. Gabriel Gilder is a San Francisco-based artist and musician. He earned a B.A. in studio art and electronic music from UC Santa Cruz.  Lin & Gilder have collaborated since 2016. Their work has been presented at The Roxie Theater, Artists Television Access (ATA), Your Mood Gallery, Aggregate Space Gallery, Incline Gallery, New Parkway Theater, Screen Share Video Gallery, and Tropical Contemporary. In 2021, their film “Shelter in Play” was an official selection at the San Francisco Independent Short Film Festival.

I'm sorry I'm late

Sharon Mooney | US

Year:

Run time: 7:22 min.

Synopsis:
Psychological deteriorations caused by invisible labor and stress slowly build. What's left as her internal and external struggles to find solid ground?  Moments taken from the The Avengers that hint at disruption, mental dissolution, and violence  slowly disintegrate to be replaced with another - another thought/another memory/another question. An ethereal soundscape with re-edited sound clips from Honey West gives voice to the tension of navigating the unnamed character's internal and external self.

Bio:
Sharon A. Mooney is a filmmaker who works in experimental, narrative and documentary portraiture, all focused on investigating desire and the human condition. Mooney’s short videos and installations have screened internationally in festivals and galleries. She is a professor at a film school in Los Angeles where she teaches filmmaking, post production, and punk rock cinema.