Mary Helena Clark, People Like Us, Paul Chan, and Husbands

Join us for Uncanny Visions, a new film & performance series, beginning at AUX Performance Space with works by Mary Helena Clark, People Like Us, Paul Chan, and Husbands (Jimmy Joe Roche & Tom Borax). Born of pressing human needs and desires, images projected by active and even anxious ritual, they pass into the upper air and dwell aloof, spectator-like and all but spectral. – Jane Harrison – describing ancient Athenian images and ritual (1913) When intensity wanes in human actors it is only a step to seek it further in mechanical means. – Jack Burnham Curated by Catherine Pancake, Uncanny Visions is a new series combining the lush private darkness of the 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 it’s extension through technology celebrates the flesh becoming art object and the anthropomorphism of the machine. Each Uncanny Visions event will join a program of experimental film with an original conceptual performance from national and internationally renowned artists. The opening night program will feature films by Mary Helena Clark, People Like Us, Paul Chan, and Jimmy Joe Roche. Following and during the film program, Husbands will present a sound and performance piece. … Mary Helena Clark is a rising voice in experimental cinema in the US. Her films and videos make use of cinematic tropes and tactics to create deft, humorous poetics. She has exhibited at the Wexner Center for the Arts, the National Gallery of Art (DC), Anthology Film Archives (NYC), International Film Festival Rotterdam, BFI London Film Festival, and the New York Film Festival – Views from the Avant-Garde. She won the George Manupelli Founder’s Spirit Award at the 50th Ann Arbor Film Festival. She recently graduated from UIC’s MFA program and is currently working on a slapstick landscape film.

Paul Chan is an internationally renowned media artist located in NYC. His work was described by Bomb magazine in 2005 as “a peculiar blend of the literary and the political, the age-old and the cutting-edge, the religious and the erotic…” He has presented in venues as diverse as Documenta, Greene Naftali Gallery, the Sundance Film Festival, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He has received awards and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and American Artists among others. People Like Us is the moniker of London DJ multimedia artist Vicki Bennett. People Like Us creates found footage collage film and video pieces of the highest caliber. The work is frequently humorous, macabre, stylish, and endlessly inventive. The Tate Modern, Sydney Opera House, Pompidou Centre, Walker Art Center and many more have presented PLU internationally. Husbands is the live audio visual performance collaboration between Baltimore based artist’s Tom Boram and Jimmy Joe Roche. According to Electronics Death Cultural Reader, “Husbands is like watching Robocop on Acid after recovering from food poisoning and joining a cult”. Jimmy Joe Roche is an American Visual Artist residing in Baltimore, MD. Roche is a member of the arts collective Wham City. His videos have screened internationally in venues including the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Incubate Arts festival in Holland and Rojo@Nova 2010 in Brazil. In 2008 Roche had his first solo exhibition at Rare Gallery in New York, 2010 marked his second solo exhibition in Colorado at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, and in January 2011, he opened his third solo exhibition, Under Pressure, at Rare Gallery. His work has appeared in numerous publications including Beautiful Decay, The New Museum’s “Younger Than Jesus” Artist Directory, “100” a new book by Francesca Gavin published in 2011, and a feature article in the November 2011 issue of the Spanish Art Magazine BELIO. Roche is a recipient of the 2012 new work residency at \ Harvestworks // in NYC and is preparing for a two man show with fellow artist Nathaniel Mellor at the Baltimore Museum of Art in the Summer of 2013 Tom Boram (aka Tom Borax) is a social worker and respectable neighborhood husband by day, freakbeat multi-instrumentalist when the sun goes down. As one-third of space-prance trio Leprechaun Catering with Jason Willett & Dan Breen, one-half of foodsperimental snazz excursion SNACKS with Dan Breen, or some mysterious fraction of two ingenious, oppositely purposed cover bands (The Louie Louise and Baltimore Afrobeat Society), Tom is a highly inventive performer and cultural participant. The editor of the Baltimore City Paper once called him a “crazy straw.” Recently relocated to Philadelphia, Catherine Pancake is an award-winning filmmaker and sound artist. Her work has been presented nationally and internationally in a wide variety of venues, including the Museum of Modern Art, Royal Ontario Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art, Academy of Fine Arts Prague and Contemporary Museum Baltimore. Her awards include the Paul Robeson Independent Media Award, Jack Spadaro Documentary Award, Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award and the Silver Chris. Her films have been broadcast in the U.S.A. and Great Britain and are distributed by Bullfrog Films and the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. Sound art releases can be found on Ehse Records and Recorded Records in Baltimore. Pancake completed her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in May 2012.  She was awarded the Claire Rosen and Samuel Edes Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists, the graduate school’s highest honor.