In Salidas y Entradas / Exits and Entrances, seniors in El Paso, Texas use the hallways, auditoriums, and kitchens of city-run senior recreation centers as a stage to explore acting and improvisation. To make the film, artists Jessica Hankey and Erin Johnson brought in a theatre director and created a series of performance workshops. With the senior center’s institutional spaces as stand-ins for the rest of the world, the senior actors use the workshops to improvise scenes for the camera that explore social and political imaginaries. Salidas is a layered film that combines documentary footage of recreational activities at the senior centers (bingo, line dancing, water aerobics) with fictional, improvised scenes that range from comic send-ups of television melodrama, to uncannily realistic encounters with authorities such as an unyielding traffic cop and an unsympathetic bank teller. Themes emerge such as gender as performance, the role of musical storytelling as a soundtrack to daily life, and the dynamics of the U.S.- Mexico border. As the boundaries between rehearsal, improvisation, and performance blur, the ways in which individual lives and sociopolitical realities merge together are foregrounded.

Jessica Hankey + Erin Johnson: Salidas y Entradas / Exits and Entrances is paired with Carolina González Valencia: In Search of The Best Cyclist in The World in Vox Populi’s Black Box Performing Arts Space as part of a program curated by Imani Roach for 4th Wall, an ongoing series dedicated to screening new film and video works by emerging artists.

About the Artists

Jessica Hankey is an interdisciplinary artist whose installations combine modes of video and photographic practices to explore the social life of institutions. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, including recent exhibitions at Bowdoin College and CTRL+SHFT in Oakland, CA. She received her MFA from UC Berkeley in 2014 and was a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2015. 
More Info: jessicahankey.com

Erin Johnson uses video, sound, performance, and social practice to explore the blurred lines between rehearsal and performance; real and imagined landscapes and borders; and perception, memory, and interpretation. She holds a MFA and Certificate in New Media from U.C. Berkeley and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Digital Media at Bowdoin College. 
More Info: erinjohnson.online