An Evening with Lynn Marie Kirby

Lynn Marie Kirby (San Francisco) inventively draws upon vernacular imagery from domestic life and the American landscape, transforming the material in the process. She also explores the unique properties of the mechanical and the digital. Her work bridges the cinema and conceptual-art worlds by putting tools to unanticipated uses, whether editing by remote control, reframing production gear as subject, or turning the editing console into an instrument for live performance. Kirby’s multimedia practice establishes the "frame" as a delimited space of improvisation and openness-for artist and viewer alike-in works of astonishing beauty and vibrancy. The program includes C to C: Several Centuries After the Double Slit Experiment (1995); Study in Choreography for Camera Remote (2001); and pieces from the Latent Light Excavation series (2004–05).

An Evening with Ricardo Nicolayevsky

Media artist, composer, and sound designer Ricardo Nicolayevsky (lives in Mexico) has been making poetically inspired film and video portraits for more than twenty years. Spontaneously captured documentary elements are combined with experimental camerawork and editing to magically conjure the essence of his subjects. Nicolayevsky presents Retratos Perdidos, 1982–1985 (Lost Portraits, 1982–1985), a series of unconventional sketches that reflect a generation of artists. Also presented is the New York premiere of Retratos para un Nuevo Milenio (Portraits for a New Millennium) (2005), a series of contemporary portraits of artists and friends in Mexico City, New York, and Paris, and self-portraits.

An Evening with Rosalind Nashashibi

Uncovering elegant simplicity in the everyday, Nashashibi’s quietly observational films capture a sense of place at a particular time. With 16mm camera in tow, she moves through public areas (in the Palestinian territories, Glasgow, and recently New York), perceiving how people utilize their neighborhoods. Eyeballing (2005) reveals how the recognition of a face in the most abstract of scenes is one of the most automatic of human responses. Nashashibi (who lives in Glasgow) represented Scotland in the 2000 Venice Biennial and received the Beck’s Futures award in 2003. She has exhibited extensively internationally.

An Evening with Song Dong

Song Dong (who lives in Beijing) combines performance, video installation, calligraphy, and sculpture, frequently in site-specific projects. Through time-based media he explores a culture in flux, as tradition and urbanization face off in contemporary society. In Broken Mirror (2003), in which he stands in Tiananmen Square and destroys one reflected urban scene to reveal another hidden behind it, the act of destruction becomes a moment of revelation. Song discusses his most recent media works produced in China, and the complex issues at the heart of this work.

An Evening with Nancy Andrews (Seal Harbor, Maine)

The program includes the world premiere of The Haunted Camera, which is preceded by the first film in the Ima Plume trilogy, Monkeys and Lumps (2003). World Premiere.

The Haunted Camera 

2006. USA. Nancy Andrews. 30 min.

Monkeys and Lumps 

2003. USA. 38 min.

MediaScope 2006: An Evening with Suzan Pitt

Also showing in Black Maria Film Festival as Program 6: Animation
Suzan Pitt (Los Angeles) has worked at the forefront of indie animation since 1970. Pitt’s work is recognized for the lavish hands-on quality of her animated drawings, which she combines with dark stories. This first New York retrospective includes her three major works: Asparagus (1979), Joy Street (1995), and the recently completed El Doctor (2006), all released for the first time on DVD by First Run Features. Asparagus (a visual poem like Joy Street) traveled for two years with David Lynch’s Eraserhead on the Midnight Movie circuit, rocking audiences with its rich cel animation and nightmarish plot. El Doctor—written by Blue Kraning and inspired by the Mexican belief in the miraculous, and featuring two sequences of experimental animation by Ben Zelkowicz and Naomi Uman—is Pitt’s first work using dialogue (Pitt collaborated with Mexican animator Dominique Jonnard to record the voices).

An Evening with Ou Ning

Guangzhou/Beijing documentarian and graphic designer Ou Ning discusses The DaZhaLan Project (2005–06), produced with artist Cao Fei. The video portrays Qianmen—one of the last remaining historic quarters of Beijing, which sits just south of Tiananmen Square and is a vestige of traditional Chinese life—and follows the city’s urbanization process, tracing conflicts caused by the imbalance between modernization and tradition. Qianmen residents, the artists, and crew reflect change in the face of the vast demolition and building projects leading up to the 2008 Olympics