AUX Performance Space
This Second Saturday program featured a performance and film by Dynasty Handbag (website) accompanied by films from Jesse McLean, Kent Lambert, Ivan Lozano, Sadie Benning, Dani Leventhal, and Frederic Moffet.
——
Dynasty Handbag (performance by Jibz Cameron)
Jibz Cameron is a performance/video artist and actor who lives and works in New York City. Her work as alter ego Dynasty Handbag has been seen such institutions as The New Museum NY, The Kitchen, DTW, MOMA PS1, Joe’s Pub, PS122, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, OUTFEST, SXSW Film Festival and Performa ’07, ’09, ’11 and many international dives both great and small. She has been heralded by the New York Times as “the funniest and most pitch perfect performance seen in years” and “crackpot genius” by the Village Voice. In addition to her work as Dynasty Handbag she has also been seen acting in work by The Wooster Group, The Residents, Theater of the 2 Headed Calf, Kalup Linzy, Susan Lori-Parks, and Jennifer Miller among others. She is a regular on the newly launched web-series “Song of The Wild” by Tim Harrington and produced by David Cross. She is the recipient of numerous awards. She is an adjunct professor of Performance and Theater studies and comedy theory at TISCH NYU. She is currently working on a new evening length Dynasty Handbag piece entitled Soggy Glasses, based on Homer’s Odyssey. Her latest video short Eternal Quadrangle premiers on MOCAtv in May. Her second Dynasty Handbag CD, Cosmic Surgery will be released in 2013, on the internets.
——
With Screenings of:
Jesse McLean
Magic for Beginners, 2010, 21m
Magic for Beginners examines the mythologies found in fan culture, from longing to obsession to psychic connections. The need for such connections (whether real or imaginary) as well as the need for an emotional release that only fantasy can deliver are explored. It interpolates the production, proliferation, and consumption of televisual experience, investigating how this transfer of information creates a bind of complex relationships between maker and viewer. Interested both in the power and the failure of the mediated experience to bring us together, my work asks the viewer to walk the line between voyeur and participant
—-
Kent Lambert
Fantasy Suite, 2009, 7m
Security Anthem, 2003, 4m
Fantasy Suite is a meditation on mainstream American heterosexual romance featuring scenes of modern day “romance” from numerous movies, magazine advertisements and TV shows, most notably the hit ABC network TV show The Bachelor. The second film screened by Lambert, Security Anthem is an “ode to flowers, fear, potatoes, and paranoia, with a special appearance by U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft.”
—-
Ivan Lozano (with John Neff)
Book of the Tumblr on Fire, 7m
Invited to participate in an evening of artists’ lectures on the subject of “magic” organized for the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art by the blog Bad at Sports, but unable to attend the event in person, John Neff and Ivan Lozano instead produced the collaborative “video lecture” BOOK OF THE TUMBLR ON FIRE. Improvised within a tripartate structure over three short editing sessions, BOOK… was assembled from a collection texts and video clips gathered from the web. Its montage technique and “look” were inspired by the wildly heterogeneous visual style of image-and-text based Tumblr microblogs. Using this approach, BOOK… presents a materialist interpretation of “magic,” concentrating less on concepts of magical cause and effect and more on the fantastic pleasures that can erupt in the embrace of impurity, polysemy and randomness.
—-
Sadie Benning
Me and Rubyfruit, 1989, 5m
Based on a novel by Rita Mae Brown, Me and Rubyfruit chronicles the enchantment of teenage lesbian love against a backdrop of pornographic images and phone sex ads. Benning portrays the innocence of female romance and the taboo prospect of female marriage. This hard-to-find video work from the hugely influential interdisciplinary musician/artist Sadie Benning is shot on a Fischer-Price Pixelvision camera when the artist was a teenager.
—-
Dani Leventhal
17 New Dam Road, 2012, 8m
In 17 New Dam Rd., Leventhal presents an oddly humanizing house visit with a rough crowd. Within the film we witness trash littering the garden, weapons in the living room, and martial arts in the shared spaces of the home. Despite the aura of violence, Leventhal explores the groups comraderie and interpersonal connections in their alternative lifestyle.
—-
Frederic Moffet
PostFace, 2011, 7m
Postface examines the filmography of Montgomery Clift in an attempt to interrogate our celebrity-obsessed culture that exploits the personal downfall of stars for profit and entertainment. Clift’s personal life spiraled downward (alongside his career) after a 1956 car crash that left his face scarred and partially paralyzed.
——
Curated by Catherine Pancake, Uncanny Visions is a series combining the lush private darkness of micro-cinema with the visceral charge of live cutting-edge performance art. The series takes inspiration from the concept of the uncanny, hoping to attract an audience who is drawn to the unfamiliar ready to take a few risks and participate in our communal unheimlich. Experimental cinema has a long historical engagement with the uncanny, crisscrossing psychoanalysis, altered states of mind, and visual illusion. Performance art’s obsession with the body and its extension through technology celebrates the flesh becoming art object and the anthropomorphism of the machine. Each Uncanny Vision event will join a program of experimental film with an original conceptual performance from national and internally renowned artists.
