MONO XI FESTIVAL DEC 5-6-7-8-9

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FIVE NIGHTS OF CINEMA ARTS

PLEASE CLICK ON THE NIGHT BELOW TO EXPAND DETAILS AND PROGRAM NOTES.
ALL NIGHTS ARE FREE TO ATTEND THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS BELOW

* WED DEC 5TH "SUPER 8 MOVEMENTS" OPENING NIGHT

Presented in partnership with Judson Memorial Church DOORS AT 7: 15 PM FREE FULL MEAL SERVED UNTIL 8 PM WHEN PROGRAM BEGINS
JUDSON MEMORIAL CHURCH 55 Washington Square South, New York, NY LIMITED SEATING, FREE TO ATTEND

Four live Super 8mm film projection performances curated by Brighid Greene as part of Judson Arts Wednesdays "JAW" at Judson Memorial Church.

BIRTHDAY, 2018 by ANIMALS, World Premiere

BIRTHDAY references nascent movie-making technology with high drama whilst including cosmographical backgrounds, fanciful space vessels, paper moon postcards, and the desire to move.

ANIMALS are Nikki Calonge, Michael De Angelis, Mike Mikos, and Eva Peskin.

Nikki Calonge is a founding member of ANIMALS. She is featured in National Theater of The United States of America’s publication of “A New Practical Guide of Rhetorical Gesture and Action”. With ANIMALS she is the recipient of the 2012 Tom Murrin Award and has been presented at Fresh Ground Pepper, CATCH, Prelude, as part of Target Margin Theater's Gertrude Stein Lab, and Under the Radar's Incoming Series. Calonge has received training from People's Improv Theater; The Patravadi Theatre and Theater Mitu in Thailand; Traditional Dance and Wayang Kulit in Bali, Indonesia. She earned her BFA from NYU/Tisch. bearelephantibex.com

Mike De Angelis is a creator of video and other visual media. He is the head of production for HuffPost Video and has collaborated and worked for theater companies Half Straddle, Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf, and artists Becca Blackwell, Sharon Hayes, Matthew Buckingham, and Andrea Geyer among others. Mike was a 2012-2013 Fellow in the Queer Arts Mentorship program. He holds BFA in Fine Arts from The Cooper Union. michaeldeangelis.com

Mike Mikos is a writer, director, performer and teacher based in NYC. He is a co-Artistic Director of ANIMALS performance group, winners of Dixon Place’s Tommy Award. Mike performed and created with the Obie-award winning Two- Headed Calf and The Talking Band, and many other companies. Mike has taught movement, devised theater, and playwriting at Pace University, NYU, Sarah Lawrence, and in workshops in Croatia, Poland, Australia, Thailand, the Catskills, and NYC. Mike holds a BFA in Theater from NYU/ETW and an MFA in Playwriting from Brooklyn College.

Eva Peskin is an artist and educator, currently working on a PhD in Women's Studies at the University of Maryland-College Park. As a performer, musician, technologist, and conceptualizer, Eva has made art work in places like the Leslie Lohman Gallery for Gay and Lesbian Art, The Public Theater, the Bushwick Starr, PS122, the Queens Museum, and the LaMont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Curious about art/performance as civic pedagogy, ecological feelings, and ethical climate futures, Eva’s research takes shapes as texts, objects, and encounters.

APPETITE, 2018 by LAUREL ATWELL, World Premiere

APPETITE is an erratic attempt to go into the details of location; being beyond the knowledge of where one is in space to know how space fills and folds around and through; letting desire guide what is seen and accepting that what is seen is forever merging with memory, history, other peoples' actions.

Since 2008, LAUREL ATWELL has been living in Brooklyn and making work that has recently become more interdisciplinary with her research conducted as a 2016 Movement Research Artist in Residence. Her work has been presented at Abrons Arts Center, Dixon Place, Center for Performance Research, Draftworks at Danspace Project, Domestic Performance Agency, Links Hall in Chicago, IL, Movement Research at Judson Church, Pieter Performance Space in Los Angeles, CA as well as throughout apartments, parks, bars, and galleries in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens. Laurel has the pleasure of collaborating with Tess Dworman; the two recently created WellMan, a class drawing from qigong and meditation practices. Laurel has recently appeared in the work of Mariangela Lopez, Phoebe Berglund, Kim Brandt, Melanie Maar, Kathy Westwater, Tess Dworman, Ursula Eagly, Nikima Jagudajev, and Milka Djordjevich. She edits the Dance Pamphlets for 53rd State Press, teaches qigong, and will be in residence at MOMA PS1 this December with Jessica Cook.

EVENINGS, 2018 by STEPHANIE GOULD, World Premiere

Nature reflects onto us through electric light.

Stephanie Gould is a visual artist specialising in photography and filmmaking. Her work has explored documentary, music, movement and colour. Alongside still film photography, she has focused on collaborative performance projects combining live video projection and sound. Originally from Melbourne, Australia, Stephanie lives and works in Queens, New York.

rachel i berman is a maui grown dancer living in new york city

Akiva Zamcheck is a musician from the Bronx. He prefers the tactile workflow of analog electric instruments and materials, including synthesisers, tape and film.

CHASING TRAINS, 2018 by JASON BERNARD LUCAS, World Premiere

When the purpose is separated from the body.

JASON BERNARD LUCAS is a Brooklyn based artist, musician, voice actor, and performer with a diverse background that spans the platforms of radio, television, theater, music, and film. Most recently he was a dancer in Spike Lee's 'BlacKkKlansman', and was also assistant choreographer on 'Chi-Raq'. As an 9-year veteran of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, he has also managed the last seven New York Film Festivals. At present Jason is the drummer in two Brooklyn based bands, The 1865 and Dragons of Zynth. Aside from his musical endeavors he has fueled his passion as an educator by teaching African hand percussion classes in New York City schools. He has worked as musical director and co-composer on pieces at the National Black Theater in Harlem, and at the Dramatist Guild Fund. Jason is a poet and playwright currently working on his first collection of poems, and his first play while working as guest artist in residence at his alma mater, Williams College. In his spare time he works as a freelance voice actor for radio and television. Jason is a Chicago native, disc jockey, unapologetic liberal, and avid cyclist.

Organizers:

*Brighid Greene makes and supports work that fearlessly leans into revisions of fantasy as a performer, producer, film programmer, and filmmaker. She works with filmmakers Lily Baldwin and Yara Travieso, teaches Super 8 classes for Mono No Aware, and watches films for Tribeca Film Festival and Cucalorus Festival. For six years she worked with Dance Films Association and produced the Dance on Camera Festival with the Film Society of Lincoln Center. She produced CROWDS by Sarah Friedland, a durational performance video installation premiering in 2019.

Brighid was a long time cast member in the critically acclaimed immersive theater show Then She Fell by Third Rail Projects, and with them developed movement for Wolves in the Wall, a VR experience that premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. She has performed with ANIMALS Performance Group, choreographer Katie Rose McLaughlin, directors Katherine Brook and Joshua William Gelb, visual artists Liz Glynn and Ryan Frank, and has an ongoing creative somatic practice with Cori Olinghouse. She has also choreographed fashion editorials in magazines like L'Officiel and for films like Josephine Decker's Madeline's Madeline which also premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Brighid makes work under the moniker Tectonic Tonia.

Brighid served on the Dance NYC Junior Committee from 2011- 2015. She studied at Tisch School of the Arts where she graduated with a BFA in Dance, a double major in Religious Studies, and as a recipient of the J.S. Seidman Award. She lives and works in New York City and is from California.

*Judson Arts Wednesdays(JAW) is the completely free, completely uncensored, completely weekly creative arm of Judson Memorial Church, a sacred and profane place that has nurtured artists and their work for decades. At every gathering of our flagship program, Bailout, we first feed the belly with a homecooked meal and then feed the soul with homecooked art.

*All of the works in this program were commissioned by and received full production support from cinema-arts non-profit organization MONO NO AWARE.

*THUR DEC 6TH "LUNG-TA OF FILM: THE FACE OF THE OTHER (LE VISAGE D’AUTRUI) × IN BEAUTY MAY YOU WALK"

Hosted at Red Bull Arts New York DOORS AT 7:00 PM PROGRAM BEGINS AT 7:30 PM SHARP
RED BULL ARTS 220 W 18th St, New York, NY 10011 LIMTED SEATING, FREE TO ATTEND

Expanded cinema projections on 16mm, 35mm and HD with installation and live performance of Manoshi Chitra Neogy (vocal), Xuezi Zhang and Scott Endsley (percussions).

“Lung-ta of Film” began with a vision: a film strip exposed with ethical awareness and reverence carries the spiritual valence as one of those strings of fabrics found on high mountains, embedded with prayers that are received only in constant motion. “Lung-ta,” the Tibetan word meaning “wind horse,” is the symbolic name of prayer flags and the flowing spirit in the movement of the wind.

“The Face of the Other” (referred to as “The Other”) began its making in the heat of the immigration crisis and was initially influenced by Emmanuel Levinas’s writings of ethical metaphysics. Stung by the situation and the mass reactions that eerily carry a danger of reductiveness, the creation of the piece started with the contemplation on alterity – the irreducibility of an other human (autrui), and thus the other’s infinity – and responsibility, which to Levinas is the command of a face-to-face relation to the other that is the most primordial datum of human experience. Behind each “collage” is a long meditation with a face of an other – politically alienated, displaced or executed – loved, revered, and worshipped. It’s a piece without an end; always a work in progress, as there is no end to human agony nor to the glimmer of holiness in humanity. Yet the physical entity has become a string of wind-horsed prayers and a moving shrine, and the presentation of which in a ceremonial atmosphere is meant to evoke a sacred bond between oneself and the strangers, who are also our neighbors.

“In Beauty May You Walk” (referred to as “Beauty”) completes “The Other” both structurally and metaphorically, reevaluating “native” and “immigrant,” “ownership” and “otherness.” It is a visual reflection of the poetry and music of Manoshi Chitra Neogy titled “Beauty” (from album “Wood Orchid,” produced by Scott Endsley), originating from a Navajo night prayer. “Beauty” – “Hozho” in the Navajo language – refers to a state of humanity and a state of the universe. Echoed by a 35mm slide show titled “The Faces of the Land,” “Beauty” is an homage to the ancestral dwellers and keepers of the very land we are inhabiting, and above all, a prayer for the state of Beauty of all beings.

The screening will be concluded and expanded with a multi-projection installation and live performance of Manoshi Chitra Neogy (vocal), Xuezi Zhang and Scott Endsley (percussions). Limited edition silver prints from the 16mm film The Others will be available for purchase. All profits made will be donated to Asylum Access, Native American Rights Fund, Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, and Fronterizo Fianza Fund.

Organizers: Originally from southeast China, Xuezi Zhang explores interdisciplinary expressions with an axis in film and video art. She received a B.F.A in Filmmaking with a second major in Comparative Literature from New York University, where she graduated as a University Honors Scholar in 2017. Her work often begins as a personal quest and progresses with the brutality of introspection and an aching for transformation. She grapples with expression and responsibility, tracing an answerless echo in the union of the personal, poetical and political. Xuezi Zhang’s work has been showcased internationally, including film festivals in Portugal, Spain, Mexico, Romania, Taiwan, Indonesia and Israel. She is now working with artist, poet, and filmmaker Manoshi Chitra Neogy on her feature film “A Warrior’s Walk Blood Words.”

Manoshi Chitra Neogy is a filmmaker, poet, performer, and author. She is a wildly talented and complex artist, determined to push the envelope of artistic expression. She has produced several documentaries and commercials, relating to self-expression, cultural issues, and art forms, which have been aired around the world and have led to countless awards and accolades, including Best Rendition of Poetry in Motion on Film at the South Asian Film Festival and the Director’s Citation Award at the Black Maria Film Festival. Neogy is also an acclaimed poet who melds vision, poetry, and word art, resulting in an alternative, thought-provoking art form, bridging ancient worlds with our multicultural worlds. Currently an adjunct professor in the film department of the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, Neogy teaches cutting-edge courses such as “Film as a Transformative Process”, “the Architecture of Dreams,” and an intermediate experimental film workshop.

Scott Endsley has been an artist for nearly four decades, living and working in Brooklyn, New York. While he has participated in numerous shows and exhibits over the years, he is more interested in alternative methods for sharing his work. In 1992, he joined an arts collective in Manhattan called the School of Bayonne, organized by Russian expatriate artists Alex Melamid and Vitaly Komar. The group developed a radical approach to art collaboration and among its creations were the world's first art radio station, an art newspaper and a commercial start-up called "Oil on Foil." Since that time, Endsley has continued to create work in the revolutionary spirit of SOB. His artistic practice includes sculptures, performance, video, scratch art with oil pastels, oil paintings, paintings on glass (“Glasschants”), and detailed “Mind Map” drawings that explore the inner tapestry of the human condition. Endsley is also the producer of Manoshi Chitra Neogy’s album “Wood Orchid,” which has provided sonic and spiritual foundations for moving image work “Orchid, Wood Orchid” and “In Beauty May You Walk.”.

Red Bull Arts New York is an experimental, non-commercial arts space dedicated to offering new opportunities to local and international artists by supporting bold ideas and ambitious projects. The organization focuses on extending the boundaries of exhibition making; supporting the production of new work by emerging and established artists; presenting historical surveys and large-scale presentations; and contributing to ongoing dialogue around contemporary issues and thought.

*"LUNG-TA OF FILM: THE FACE OF THE OTHER (LE VISAGE D’AUTRUI) × IN BEAUTY MAY YOU WALK" was commissioned and received full production support from MONO NO AWARE.

*FRI DEC 7TH "SPECTRAL UNITY"

GALLERY DOORS AT 7:00 PM EXHIBITION ON VIEW UNTIL PROGRAM BEGINS AT 8 PM SHARP
LIGHTSPACE STUDIOS 130 Thames St, Brooklyn, NY 11237 LIMTED SEATING, FREE TO ATTEND

FIRE (RGB) / 16MM SINGLE-PROJECTION & INSTALLATION / VIKTORIA SCHMID (VIENNA, AUSTRIA) : Schmid’s installation involves looking back to the early pioneers of photochemical processes in order to re-imagine and reinvent them in the present. 
The color film was exposed three times, each time through a different filter in the primary colors red, green and blue. The different temporal stages of a fireplace thus appear in unnatural, colorful colors. The duration of the burning fire is condensed into another - into the temporal dimension of the filmloop. The size of the rear projection screen (4“ width) defies the maxim/dictum of the cinema dispositif- a largest projection possible. Furthermore the projection can be viewed through a diffractionsheet, which continues the splitting of the light into red, green and blue. Another work in Schmid’s research with the early color film process and an exploration of the possibilities of a film installation in reference to the architecture of cinema.

Viktoria Schmid is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Vienna, who is working at the interface of the cinematic and the exhibition space. She studied at the Friedl-Kubelka-School, received her BA in film theory from the University of Vienna and her MA from the University of Art in Linz. Her installations and films are shown internationally in the framework of film festivals and exhibitions. She received several grants and stipends like the start-scholarship for video and media art and the Media Art Honorary Prize Lower Austria and participated in the Djerassi Resident Artist Program. The different mediums she uses, like 16mm-film, video and photography are the co-authors of her work - she enjoys that their specific characteristics are forming her pieces.

EXQUISITE CORPSE, MOVEMENT IN FIVE PARTS / 16MM QUINTUPLE-PROJECTION INSTALLATION / TREVOR TWEETEN (NEW YORK, USA): Five projectors deconstructed and reassembled as a unified machine project synchronously a single piece 16mm film, creating a vertical collage of moving images. The images are constructed in a way that evoke the exquisite corpse game of the Surrealists, revealing the body in five sections: the head, the torso, the waist, the legs, and the feet. Five dancers working in collaboration with choreographer Lydia Chrisman stand, walk, run, turn and bend. Each body occupies one of the five screens, together creating a new composite dancing body, a sum of the parts. The images interact and combine in surprising, playful and irrational ways, challenging the viewer’s conception of what the body is and how it moves as a whole. Andre Breton wrote about the exquisite corpse as a way of breaking apart the expected notions of a structure and working together to create a new amalgam of images that could not be the result of any single participant, but rather of the combination of the group. While the syntax of the piece is dictated by the linear mechanics of the sculpture - the piece of film, like time, travels only forward - the resulting images are nonlinear, made up of disparate parts. The piece is an open system with the tactile whirling of film and the sound of the projectors turning, which spin in tandem with the bodies on the screen. Featuring Stacy Grossfield, Paul Hamilton, Anaïs Maviel ,Antonio Ramos and Sarah White- Ayon.

Trevor Tweeten (b. USA 1983) is a New York-based artist and cinematographer. He holds a BA in Film and Video Art and works at the crossroads between video, sculpture and installation. As a cinematographer, he has realized a number of films and video art projects, ranging from narrative to documentary to experimental. He has worked on projects with a number of accomplished artists, including long term collaborations with Richard Mosse, as well as working with Tacita Dean, Anicka Yi, Benjamin Millepied and Sarah Meyohas. His work, often noted for its strong imagery and lyrical visual style, has been exhibited internationally including the Venice Biennale (2013), Barbican Centre, Louisiana Museum, Palais de Tokyo, Akademie der Künste, the National Gallery of Victoria and many others.

Lydia Chrisman is a performer, dance-maker and teacher from Zurich, Switzerland based in New York City. She has recently worked on projects with David Gordon, Rebecca Davis, Daria Faïn, Mina Nishimura, among others. Lydia’s choreographic work has been presented at Dixon Place, Movement Research’s Open Performance and the Knockdown Center. Lydia teaches music and movement in NYC public and private schools through Third Street Music School Settlement. She is currently studying to become an Alexander Technique teacher at Balance Arts Center under Ann Rodiger.

UNTITLED STILL LIFE / 16MM SINGLE-PROJECTION & INSTALLATION / REBECCA ERIN MORAN (REYKJAVIK, ICELAND) : Untitled Still Life is a 16mm lm loop that references the Still Life painting genre and the GIF. Traditional still life often sought to portray our most beloved objects. Yet what is more real than the folders holding all of our creations in the non-physical space that we gaze into every day? Untitled questions how virtuality and materiality are interchangeable, physical attributes and icons becoming objects and visa versa. It is an ode to the folder, in the folder, inside the folder, within a folder; as the cloud floats past our windows...

Rebecca Erin Moran is an American Icelandic artist based between Berlin and and Reykjavík. Her work is conceptually driven, taking diverse forms such as installation, sculpture, performance, and projection. Perception, of time and of thing, is a central focus of my artistic practice in the last years. It aims to question the perceived linearity of time, play with its materiality, pause its now, or ponder the still images that become motion with our conscious mind. What is the duration of a volume of time compressed into a space; the repetition of a sequence of single frames of film, the materialization of time in an object? What is a thing, a collection of matter, an icon, a representation? How does our vision, our language, or identity affect how we transcribe the world beyond us? How does the agency of objects, places, and processes form us? It is a research and process based practice infused with questions, not answers, and strives to invoke an inquisitive state of being in the viewer.

(Installations will be on view Friday & Saturday from 7-8pm and in between each durational presentation)

PARASITIC OSCILLATION / SUPER 8MM SINGLE-PROJECTION PERFORMANCE / BRIAN RATIGAN (NEW YORK, USA) & EDWARD PAUL QUIST (NEW YORK, USA) : A strange transmission begins broadcasting from an unknown signal. Visuals by Edward Paul Quist and Brian Ratigan. Original music by embryoroom. Produced by Non Films and Edward Paul Quist.

Brian Ratigan is the founder and director of Non Films and is based in New York City. He serves as Director of Animation for Kumar Pictures, manages Chaotic Cinema, and screens work at festivals worldwide.

Edward Paul Quist was born in 1976 in Brooklyn New York. A director, writer, producer, composer, sound designer, photographer and documentarian, lives and works in New York City under the name embryoroom.

CINE間(MA)-ABSENCE TRIGGERED BY A THIRD BODY / SUPER 8MM SINGLE-PROJECTION PERFORMANCE / TETSUYA MARUYAMA,( YOKOHAMA, JAPAN) : In Japanese, 間(MA) is best described as a consciousness of interval/space, not in the sense of an enclosed three-dimensional entity, but rather the awareness of form and non-form deriving from an intensification of senses. Similarly, to many other countries in the world, it was common in the 1980s in Japan to film one ́s children in super 8. My father, like many other families at this time, filmed my brother and I during our childhood with an affectionate gaze, which he rarely showed in person day to day. During this time Japan’s economy was growing steadily, until the early 90’s and we also saw the magnetic image start to take over film. Time went by and we are in 2017; when I traveled back to Japan. There, with my super8 camera, I filmed several fragments of my 76-year-old father's body, up-to-date, so different from the body that used to film me. I enjoyed every possible occasion to film his body in (non)movement during one month: breathing, sleeping, eating. These undisclosed black and white fragments were stored in my fridge when I returned to Brazil, together with an old colored film shot by my father. This audiovisual photosynthesis intertwines my father's fresh body and his son's old body, triggered by a third poetic presence, obscuring the boundaries within a paradoxical setting of a diegetic space and non-synchronized sound fragments collected on magnetic body, after the interval(間) of 32 years.

Tetsuya Maruyama (Yokohama, 1983) lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Bachelor in Architecture from University of Buffalo(NY), and Montage from Darcy Ribeiro Film School(Rio de Janeiro), his work misuses the degraded texture present in each passage of light, conducting itself in an unknown territory. Believing in the excessive presence of images in the contemporary world, the artist uses the same abundance and the velocity to disfigure them, to look for an experience beyond them. His film participations include Hamburg International Short Film Festival(Germany), Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento(Buenos Aires) and others.

LYDON / 16MM SINGLE-PROJECTION / LUCY KERR (CALIFORNIA, USA) : Lydon explores the potential of a minimal gesture.

Lucy Kerr is a choreographer and video, film, performance, and installation artist based in Los Angeles, CA and Brooklyn, NY. She is currently an MFA candidate in Film/Video at California Institute of the Arts. Her projects have been presented with The Brooklyn Museum, Anthology Film Archives, The Chimney NYC, Cucalorus Festival, Mono No Aware, Echo Park Film Center, Dance Films Association, Co-Lab Projects, The Aurora Picture Show, The Center for Performance Research, Triskelion Arts, LEIMAY, Brooklyn Studios for Dance, IDIO Gallery, Lubov Gallery NYC, and The MATCH Houston, among others. Kerr co-curated and co-organized the 7 week dance on film festival, Dance Film; Deconstructed, in Fall 2017 in partnership with Emily Smith at Brooklyn Studios for Dance and with collaborating organizations Mono No Aware and Dance Films Association. She was the writer for LEIMAY’s theoretical publication accompanying the production of borders (2016) at BAM. As a dancer, Kerr has also performed with LEIMAY in multiple projects.

HAMOOD IN AMERICA / SUPER 16MM SINGLE-PROJECTION PERFORMANCE / SAIF AL-SOBAIHI (NEW YORK, USA), MOE KAMAL (GEORGIA, USA), and RYAN HANCE (TEXAS, USA): A Saudi teen moves to Georgia a few months before Trump is elected.

SAIF AL-SOBAIHI: Do I have to write that I am a “Saudi Cinematographer”?

RYAN HANCE: Of course not. We just enjoy exploring the depths of the human psyche through character, image, or analysis of the audience. Honestly, it’d probably be more appropriate to say that you’re a Saudi scientist.

MOE KAMAL: Really, you are both just obsessed with the human condition. It’s probably due to the fact that as Saudi man like myself, Saif, and as Jew trapped in Texas, Ryan, you were raised to always ask questions to discover deeper truths. I’d call you two sages, but what do I know? I’m just a dancer.

SOLO DUET / SUPER 8MM DUAL-PROJECTION PERFORMANCE / LAURA BARTCZAK (NEW YORK, USA) : One movement phrase captured from multiple perspectives and projected side by side. An embodied narrative is revealed through subtle synchronicities and repeated rhythms. The solo becomes a duet. Featuring dance artist Melanie Maar.

Laura Bartczak is a Brooklyn based performer and visual artist originally from Pine, Colorado. She received a BFA in Dance Performance and Choreography from Western Washington University. She makes super 8mm films, site specific dance, and performance documentation. Her choreography and film work has been presented by Anthology Film Archives, Lubov Gallery, AUNTS, Movement Research at Judson Church, Sarah Lawrence College, CATCH 70, Mono No Aware, The Domestic Performance Agency, Hypnocraft, Gina Gibney Dance Center, DCTV, Dance Film Association, Otion Front, Trans Pecos, and Secret Project Robot, among others. As a performer she has had the opportunity to work and collaborate with Laurel Atwell, Lindsey Drury, Shandoah Goldman, Lauren Petty & Shaun Irons, Thea Little, Hadar Ahuvia, Paige Hunter, Kaia Gilje, Corinne Cappelletti, Kay Ottinger, and Katelyn Hales. As a photographer she has documented performance works by Melanie Maar, Athena Kokoronis, Laurel Atwell, Marion Spencer, Lorene Bouboushian, and more. Laura currently teaches yoga and super 8mm film workshops with Mono No Aware.

63 ACRES: DEAR DANNY LYON / SUPER 8MM SINGLE-PROJECTION PERFORMANCE / STEPHANIE GRAY (BROOKLYN, USA) : A super 8 film-poem to Lower Manhattan's disappeared "63 acres" (per photographer Danny Lyon, the only one thought to have captured images of such destruction when it occurred in the late 60s). Gray returns to sites obliterated for eminent domain, with no public outcry at the time: historic buildings and entire streets forcefully vanished from Manhattan's map. 63 acres, quoted from Lyon, refers to the amount of downtown that was destroyed via eminent domain -- for what eventually became the WTC, a new entrance ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge and the expansion of Pace University. Danny has been quoted saying, "I don't recall ever seeing a single other photographer in front of a building during the six months it took to demolish them, though many hundreds of professional photographers then lived in Manhattan." Danny is referenced in the voiceover as Gray retraces where his loft was and where he photographed last standing buildings. Gray films the as-they-stand now-corners and the places where streets disappeared, comparing old maps to new maps. What happened to the small businesses and small number of residents? The workers? The ones who took the buildings apart bit by bit? What about the restaurant Sweet's that all the secretaries and dock workers used to go to? On an old photocopied map, the now disappeared street "New Chambers" appears and is compared to a much less crowded map on a modern day bus shelter, as the filmmaker looks back and forth, over and over, trying to understand and fathom, incredulously, the magnitude of streets that died. Gray will be reading live with the film.

Poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray's super 8 films have screened internationally at fests such as Oberhausen, Viennale, Antimatter, Experiments in Cinema, Ann Arbor, Onion City, the 8 Fest, Chicago Underground, and in featured solo screenings in venues such as San Francisco Cinematheque, Microscope Gallery and Mono No Aware, along with a retrospective at Anthology Film Archives in 2015. Recent poetry publications include a chapbook "go under the surface" (above ground press, 2018), a book, "Shorthand and Electric Language Stars" (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2015) and a chapbook "A Country Road Going Back in Your Direction" (Argos Books, 2015).

*SAT DEC 8TH "UNDER THE CLOAK OF DARKNESS"

GALLERY DOORS AT 7:00 PM EXHIBITION ON VIEW UNTIL PROGRAM BEGINS AT 8 PM SHARP
LIGHTSPACE STUDIOS 130 Thames St, Brooklyn, NY 11237 LIMTED SEATING, FREE TO ATTEND

FIRE (RGB) / 16MM SINGLE-PROJECTION & INSTALLATION / VIKTORIA SCHMID (VIENNA, AUSTRIA)

EXQUISITE CORPSE, MOVEMENT IN FIVE PARTS / 16MM QUINTUPLE-PROJECTION INSTALLATION / TREVOR TWEETEN & LYDIA CHRISMAN (NEW YORK, USA):

UNTITLED STILL LIFE / 16MM SINGLE-PROJECTION & INSTALLATION / REBECCA ERIN MORAN (REYKJAVIK, ICELAND)

(Installations (above) will be on view Friday & Saturday from 7-8pm and in between each durational presentation until the end of the event on Saturday evening)

FROM DAY TO NIGHT / 16MM SINGLE-PROJECTION PERFORMANCE / ROBERT ORLOWSKI (NEW YORK, USA) & ALEXANDER - DAVID SHAPIRO (CONNECTICUT, USA) : A song of in-camera improvisations composed to the rhythm of the sun's energy throughout the passage of a day.

Robert Orlowski is a filmmaker who currently resides in Brooklyn, NY. His filmmaking interests are rooted in his fascination with the quotidian: primarily the understanding of memory, perception, vision and the culmination of their relationship. It is his hope to better render the brilliance of daily occurrences and evoke a sensation of being. He is currently working on several projects on 16mm.

Alexander is the solo guitar music made by New Haven, Connecticut, native David Shapiro (Kath Bloom, Headroom, Nagual). Drawing from a wide range of guitar traditions, Alexander live sets vary from finger-style acoustic guitar music to psychedelic feed-back oriented improvised electric guitar excursions. Equally influenced by the melodic style of Robbie Basho and John Fahey, the guitar damage of Alvarius B, and the electric echoes of Keiji Haino, Alexander offers a unique synthesis of guitar vocabulary imbued with deep emotion.

GOLEM RITE / 16MM TRIPLE-PROJECTION PERFORMANCE / MARY LEWANDOWSKI, (ROCHESTER, USA) & NILSON CARROLL (ROCHESTER, USA): Golem Rite follows two partners on a journey to collect magic items in order to enact the golem ritual.

Mary Lewandowski and Nilson Carroll are MFA candidates at Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY. Mary has been practicing performance art and ritual for two decades. Nilson is a barista-poet and makes queer video game art. Together, they make 16mm films and performances as Substantial Cinema.

DESAPARCER / DISAPPEAR / 16MM MULTI-PROJECTION PERFORMANCE / ELENA PARDO, MANUEL TRUILLO & JAVIER LARA (MEXICO CITY, MEXICO): Desaparecer / Disappear: to stop being in sight or in a place, to cease to exist. In Mexico one person disappears every 1 hour and 50 minutes, that is, 13 people a day. Through the use of landscape and self portrait, we explore the ephemeral quality of image and physical presence.

Elena Pardo lives between Oaxaca and Mexico City, where she has worked as a documentary, experimental cinema and animation filmmaker. Her short films have been selected at festivals and have been part of curatorial projects and experimental film compilations in Mexico, United States, Spain and France. She's part of Trinchera Ensamble, an expanded cinema collective that recycles film equipment and footage for its performances. This interest in reusing materials resulted in her joining the community of filmmakers, programmers and scholars that carries out the Encuentro Internacional de Archivistas Audiovisuales (International Audiovisual Archive's meeting) in Oaxaca every year since 2014. Since 2007, she has participated as a teacher of video production and animation with young people from diverse communities in Oaxaca. In 2013, she cofounded the Laboratorio Experimental de Cine (LEC), an association dedicated to screening, producing and teaching about experimental cinema. An important part of this project is the preservation and dissemination of film-lab techniques and knowledge.

Manuel Trujillo is a film programmer, visual artist, film performer, co-founder of the projects Trinchera Ensamble and Experimental Film Laboratory (LEC), both projects linked to cinema and other contemporary arts such as performance, installation, object art and conceptual art, among other. He currently directs the Faro Aragón project, a community space focused on audiovisual arts. His work has been presented in festivals and museums in Europe and other countries, such as the FLEX festivals in Florida, Antimatter in Canada, Mexparismental and Cinema des Different in Paris, The Museum of Fine Arts of Santiago de Chile, L’Alternativa, in Barcelona; in addition to the Museums Quartier and the Samlumg Essel Museum in Vienna, Austria. He has also performed on tours around the world such as the Festival Signés de Nuit, where his work Sinfonía Insanía (Mexico) was presented at an international retrospective on Fine Arts in Beirut, Lebanon, in 2004; and at the Eksperimento Festival held in the Philippines. In Mexico, it has been presented in places such as the Alameda Art Laboratory, the City Museum, the Carrillo Gil Art Museum, the Tamayo Museum and the Aural Festival among others. He has also taught Art and Film workshops at the UNAM-Artistic Linkage Unit (UVA), the Autonomous University of Mexico City (UACM), the Contemporary Art Foundation of Montevideo, Uruguay, the Student Foundation 47 and in community projects on visual culture in different cities.

Javier Lara is a Mexican composer of electronic music, sound designer and an active collaborator in works involving instruments and other media. Based in Mexico City, his work has transcended artistic practices to expand into cultural management and curatorship of exhibitions and interdisciplinary projects. His career in the field of sound includes 5 solo albums, 1 album with his project “Astrolab-iO" -a duet of experimental electronic music- with the renowned Mexican musician Alex Otaola- and countless collaborations with sound and visual artists in artistic expressions such as live acts, contemporary dance, expanded cinema, live music, theater or poetry, among others. In the most recent 6 years, his live performances have been distinguished by the use of modular synthesizers live. Either with systems in Eurorack format or with his Buchla Music Easel modular synthesizer, the use of these instruments as main sound generators during his live performances give an remarkable performative character to his presentations.

STASIS & MOTION / 16MM MULTI-PROJECTION PERFORMANCE / JOHN MARKS, CRYSTAL MYSLAJEK, & SAM HOOLIHAN (MINNESOTA, USA) : Stasis & Motion is a performance featuring hand processed 16mm films, keyboard, voice and modular synthesizer by Minneapolis based artists Sam Hoolihan, John Marks and Crystal Myslajek. With Stasis & Motion the artists engage in a parsing of visual and sonic phrases, seamlessly layering and reorganizing the resulting fragments into gestures where images and sounds form a singular language. Embracing the ephemerality of 16mm film projection and live music, this work treats both light and sound as fleeting platforms for pause where motion is fashioned through modulation.

John Marks is a Minneapolis-based artist, performer, and curator working at the intersections of media, music, and visual art. Presently, his practice integrates 16mm film projections, audio synthesis, and electroacoustic tape music to compose multimedia performances and fixed media works that focus on natural and constructed landscapes. John’s recent work has been commissioned by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and has been presented throughout North America including Mono No Aware (NYC), Echo Park Film Center (LA), and the Winnipeg Underground Film Festival (MB).

Crystal Myslajek is a multi-instrumentalist, performer, and composer, who blends looping, ethereal vocals, and effects with minimalist, post-classical, jazz, and pop forms. She collaborates across disciplines including experimental film, performance art, theater, and dance. Crystal has composed and performed music for projects commissioned by the Walker Art Center and The Red Eye Theater in Minneapolis, and has presented at screenings, festivals, and concerts throughout North America including the Winnipeg Underground Film Festival (2017), Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles (2016) and at the MONO NO AWARE international film exhibition in Brooklyn, NY (2015).

Sam Hoolihan is a Minneapolis-based visual artist and educator blending photography, film/video, and performance. Sam’s recent films have focused on creating meditative portraits of cities and landscapes in 16mm, often collaborating with sound artists to create unique live projection presentations. His films have screened in Chicago, Brooklyn, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Sam is currently teaching handmade cinema and media arts at MCAD and the University of Minnesota.

LOVEMOON BATTLEFIELD / 16MM MULTI-PROJECTION PERFORMANCE / ALEX CUNNINGHAM (NORTH CAROLINA, USA) : An interactive re-sequencing and improvisational visualizing of Frank Stanford’s unpunctuated epic 1977 poem, “The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You”. Stanford’s poem operates with a sort of dream logic, if any. In this performance film, we operate with liveness, randomness, and instinct to determine the order of things. Together, we’ll randomly select and sequence a sample of just some of the 15,283 lines from the poem and let a slide projector narrate them. Meanwhile, a live montage in response to the shuffled text is performed with 15 1-minute films between two 16mm projectors. Will a narrative emerge? Will text and light and rhythm collaborate to create a new logic? Or will chaos reign? Either way, it seems somewhat out of our control. “I’m going to do a few things can’t nobody follow we could always go back to biting the heads off fish and chickens“

A filmmaker and educator, Alex Cunningham's work flutters between different forms, modes, and media but always prioritizes the asking of questions over the answering of them.

A CHORUS OF BLACK VOIDS SINGS IN RAYS OF UNSEEABLE LIGHT / 16MM PROJECTION PERFORMANCE / MICHAEL A MORRIS (TEXAS, USA) :A study in media ontology and the ritual space of cinema in which we sit together in the darkness. As the physical form of film is negated, a stream of light emerges. As the light goes out, its impression is stored as data, but its nature has been changed, like the persistent light of an already dead star.

Michael A. Morris is an artist and educator based in Dallas, Texas. His work responds to the rapid changes in how moving images are created and experienced in the 21st century, affirming the traditional space of experiencing cinema while also exploring the implications of new media. He has performed and screened his films and videos at museums, galleries, microcinemas, and film festivals internationally. He teaches at several institutions throughout the Dallas/Fort Worth area and curates programs around the region regularly.

A CLOCKFACE ORANGE PRESENTS : LIQUID WALLPAPER WITH SOUNDSCAPES BY UNDERWORLD OSCILLATOR CORPORATION / LIQUID LIGHT PROJECTION PERFORMANCE / RACHAEL GUMA, CAROLYN FUNK, GENEVIEVE H.K.*, RICHARD SYLVARNES & GABRIEL GUMA (NEW YORK, USA) : Live psychedelic light show will tint the mood of the evening's program between performances, with enveloping electronic musical backdrops. A Clockface Orange is a liquid light projection group consisting of Rachael Guma and Genevieve HK. Using analog equipment and props to create live psychedelic visuals, they've performed for bands as well as part of the expanded cinema project Optipus. Their work has been presented at Microscope Gallery in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of the exhibition “Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema & Art, 1905-2016”, the Parrish Museum, Mana Contemporary, and Redbank Film Festival. A Clockface Orange also teaches liquid light projection and performance at MONO NO AWARE.

Carolyn Funk is an NYC based artist and projectionist.

Rachael Guma is a filmmaker and sound artist currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been presented at the San Francisco Cinematheque, Mono No Aware, UnionDocs, AXWFF, Echo Park Film Center, The Kitchen, Museum of Art and Design (MAD), Transient Visions, and Microscope Gallery in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her teaching experience includes artist visits at Brooklyn College, University of Colorado, Boulder, and Sarah Lawrence, animation, sound for film and theremin workshops at the Children's Museum of the Arts, and Super 8mm workshops for Mono No Aware.

*In spirit - Genevieve HK is a projectionist and archivist working in and around NYC.

Richard Sylvarnes is an artist that works in the mediums of photography, film, and music. His work has been shown internationally at museums, galleries, clubs, performance spaces and cinemas. Richard has made music under various monikers including Sylvarluxe, Zero Times Everything, and the Underworld Oscillator Corporation. He holds a Bachelors Degree in Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology and has studied film making at New York University, music at Berklee College of Music, and art at the School of Visual Arts. He has been a guest Lecturer at Harvard University.

Gabriel Guma is a graphic artist and self-described "sonic tinkerer". Either as part of the electronic music group Underworld Oscillator Corporation, as a member of the expanded film collective Optipus, or in collaboration with filmmaker/sound artist/partner-in-crime Rachael Guma, he has performed at Anthology Film Archives, the Morbid Anatomy Museum, Parrish Art Museum, the annual Filmmakers Co-op Benefit, Mana Contemporary, Muchmore's, Secret Project Robot, Transient Visions Festival of the Moving Image, Microscope Gallery, and the Knockdown Center—the latter two as part of the Dreamlands expanded cinema exhibition and series of events, co-organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art.

*SUN DEC 9TH "MONO TRACKS"

Presented in partnership with The Wythe Hotel Cinema DOORS AT 7:00 PM 7:15 PM SCREENING HAS SOLD OUT PLEASE RSVP BELOW FOR THE SECOND SCREENING AT 8:15 PM - RSVP NOW FOR 8:15 PM!
WYTHE HOTEL CINEMA 80 Wythe Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11249 LIMTED SEATING, FREE TO ATTEND

MONO TRACKS is a program of 16mm prints with optical sound. These are collaborations between musicians and artists conducted in camera.

RAPT, 2018 by MELISSA CHA, World Premiere

An abstract film about becoming conscious of your body and the space it occupies in a city.

MELISSA CHA is a filmmaker, video artist and musician from San Francisco. She studied film at RISD and lived in Austin for several years, where she collaborated with other artists and musicians on experimental video projects. She currently lives in Brooklyn, where she is focused on collaborative performance and building collectivism within her community.

FLÁVIA FANTINI is a dancer and traveler from Brazil. Wherever she goes, she seeks other open people to collaborate with.

WHO YOU GIVE YOUR HEART TO, 2018 by PHOEBE COLLINGS-JAMES, World Premiere

WHO YOU GIVE YOUR HEART TO was shot at the final outdoor Soul Summit Party of the summer in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn. I wanted to capture the incredible sensation of freeness that their parties give people. The accompanying music is a soon to be released track of the same name by KINDNESS feat. Alexandria.

Phoebe Collings-James is a Jamaican British artist, born in London and living in New York. Her works take form in drawing, video, sculpture and music, with distinctly corporeal approach. She burdens ubiquitous materials with a process of symbolic layering, all in order to explore emotional connections to the politics and erotics of violence, language and fear. Recent exhibitions include Relative Strength, Arcadia Missa; The Amount of Love You Have to Give is More Than I Can Stand, Ginevra Gambino; Harlem Postcards, Studio Museum Harlem; ATROPHILIA, Company Gallery and Blood on the Leaves Blood on the Roots, Preteen Gallery, Mexico City. Other projects include Sculpture Centre featured artist, original soundtracks for performance works by Jamila Johnson‐Small, Artist‐in‐residence at Wysing Art Centre, Cambridge and performances, Just Give Me A Minute, at Palais de Tokyo, Paris and Sounds 4 Survival, which will tour in 2019.

WHAT’S THE MEANING OF THIS?, 2018 by PIMO, World Premiere

WHAT’S THE MEANING OF THIS? is a song from PIMO’s (Pixy and Moro’s band) latest album “Hello World”. The video is loosely based on Pixy and Moro’s relationship in the form of a cult. WHAT’S THE MEANING OF THIS? is also the endless question to our daily behavior.

PIMO is consisted of Pixy Liao and Takahiro Morooka (Moro). Born and raised in Shanghai, Pixy Liao is an artist currently resides in New York. Her long-term photo project “Experimental Relationship” challenges conventional ideas of gender dynamics. Takahiro Morooka is a multi-instrumental Japanese musician. He formed the band PIMO with Pixy and he is also the muse for Pixy’s artwork.

MOTION AT A DISTANCE, 2018 by LINDSAY PACKER & ANDREW YONG HOON LEE, World Premiere

This stop-motion animation by Lindsay Packer with soundtrack by Andrew Yong Hoon Lee connects Packer’s light-based installation and performance work to film. Color takes ephemeral form within a soundscape. Shadow shapes emerge, interact and recede as luminous, temporary geometries call into question the divisions between analog and digital ways of seeing and believing. Lee's composition uses sound as material and is pushed and pulled much like paint on a canvas to create abstract textures that evoke mood and memory.

Lindsay Packer's light-based installations, performances, videos and photography have been featured at Transmitter, Present Company, NURTUREart, and The Chocolate Factory Theater, among other spaces. She received a BFA from RISD, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to India in Installation Art, and has twice been Artist in Residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. Packer regularly conducts workshops on light and color for undergraduates and other audiences and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Andrew Yong Hoon Lee is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist. His installations, sound compositions, and music have been exhibited in Vancouver, Malmo and New York. Andrew has performed and presented sound works at The Centre for Performance Research in New York, Kunstradio in Vienna, The Surrey Art Gallery and most recently a sound installation at The International Symposium On Electronic Art. He has performed sonic responses to the visual art of Ian Wallace and Khan Lee for the Vancouver Art Gallery, and composed a sound piece for Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries that conveyed the characteristics of seeing.

Organizers:

Wythe Hotel is the original boutique hotel in Williamsburg Brooklyn, focused on culture, food, community, and warm, genuine service. We are staunchly local, and mindful of our role in Brooklyn’s proud history of welcoming people from all over the world.

*All of the works in this program were commissioned and received full production support from MONO NO AWARE.


PRESENTING SPONSORS 2018

 
 
 

CONTRIBUTING SPONSORS 2018

FRIEND OF THE FESTIVAL 2018

11TH ANNIVERSARY HOST VENUES

YEAR ROUND SUPPORT 2018

MONO NO AWARE is proud to promote the 16mm direct animation work An Ecstatic Experience by Ja'Tovia Gary as our festival call for entries image this year. Ja'Tovia is a former workshop participant from 2013, who became an instructor with the organiz…

MONO NO AWARE is proud to promote the 16mm direct animation work An Ecstatic Experience by Ja'Tovia Gary as our festival call for entries image this year. Ja'Tovia is a former workshop participant from 2013, who became an instructor with the organization and continues to 'posit a future in which Blackness, the feminine, and non-traditional ontologies are centralized' on and off screen.