The UMW Media Wall artists for the month of May are Sarah Knoebel, Lei Han, and David Bickley.

Cycles (no. 2) – Sarah Knoebel (Billings, Montana, USA)
Sarah Knobel is a photographer and video artist. Her work has been featured in exhibitions national and internationally, which include  Miami, Seattle, Portland, Kansas City, Washington DC, Germany, Belgium and Greece.  Sarah holds an MFA in Photography from the Design Architecture Art and Planning Program at the University of Cincinnati and a BFA in Studio Art from Texas State University.  She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Montana State University in Billings, Montana. www.sarahknobel.com

The UMW Media Wall artists for the month of March are Leslie Supnet, Lauren Cook, David Fodel, and Jin Kyu Ahn.

PXXXL – Lauren Cook
Using century old technology, PXXXL creates digital glitch from analogue process. It was animated directly on the celluloid without a camera, in a darkroom, using lights, objects, and handmade lenses.

Nimitta – David Fodel
A realtime animation work that mainfests according to a predetermined set of relationships between sonic and computational processes, but which unfolds differently each time it is performed. This video is one such performance. A set of rules, and an emergent “sign”, struggling it seems to come into its own, to become a form, simultaneously pulling, stretching, expanding, in-forming. Geometric operators create the visual ouput in real time as they viewer imagines the “soundtrack” that generated it.

Second Sun – Leslie Supnet
The rising sound of drums emphasizes flashes of lights, images of the solar system and a post-apocalyptic imagining of the birth of our Second Sun.

Flipping -Jin Kyu Ahn
FLIPPING is an automatic animation (action animating) created by applying ‘flipping’, a traditional hand-drawn animation technique. The spectrum of a soundless collision between cuts created by a collision of two different physical properties again collides with the sound made by playing two improvised scores folded after burnt. This work has a structure with the complex relationship that two planes are oppositely located in the light and dark space, two materials exist between the two planes, and two sounds permeate between the two materials. And it stays between the life(time) and sensibility of the artist himself.

The UMW Media Wall artists for the month of February are Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder.

In our installation work, we use projected light to articulate space and time. Film projectors and celluloid are the material base of our constructions in light and shadow, the elemental properties of cinema. These things are deeply imbued with a history of viewership in the dark of the theater. To remove it from darkness is to flood this history and cast a certain illumination upon it. A certain exposure. Light spills in the shifting of film from its native darkness in enclosed chambers (camera obscura) to the uncanny openness and defamiliarized illumination of installation. We are exploring the shift, elaborating the displacement, recasting the light mechanics of a peculiar estrangement of the medium. The art of cinema, yes. But more timely: the becoming cinema of art. That is the coming attraction for us. (Gibson + Recoder)

Dark Chamber Disclosure

Gibson / Recoder in their live projection work  Dark Chamber Disclosure, showcase an inversion of supreme materiality. Gibson and Recoder seem to get rid of film material all together, casting on the cinema’s walls the shimmering colored lights of pre-camera/projector early cinema or the shadowplay of Plato’s cave. The light work resembles unfurling smoke and lapping waterfalls in a fluid, satiny effect that in no way seems filmic: no frame rate, no grain, no scratches or reels, and certainly no representation. Nothing seems like film. And yet the work is entirely based in projection and films, with two 35mm projectors used and two films, one of clear leader and one of an actual film projected upside down and out of focus and refracted through crystals, lenses and gels and further manipulated with their hands. So much cinema and yet totally suggestive of something beyond cinema (beyond meaning both before and after), and while nominally narrativized and timed to a recorded musical piece of field recordings, the work’s unrestrained movements (expanding beyond even the cinema screen into the theater space itself) seem to suppress the 20th century’s finite cinematic technology to evoke an ephemeral play of light unbounded by beginnings and ends. Because all the possibilities in the world seem at the hands of these filmmakers and they no longer need to seek the infinite, it is no longer the focus of their works, but rather the attitude of a working method, where what was once the end (if unending) for a story to pursue has now become the means with which to pursue other stories. (Daniel Kasman, MUBI)

Stations of Light

 A project for DCP (Digital Cinema Package) projection and file distribution, “Stations of Light” was made in response to the limitations of current theatrical standardization of digital cinema. The full title “Stations of Light: Installation for Two Movie Theaters, One Audience, and Musician” premiered at the International Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen in 2014. For this commissioned work, the artists extended the collaborative nature of their project by inviting their festival host Mika Taanila to select the films to be reworked live via a special refracting apparatus placed directly in the path of the projected lights of two adjacent screening rooms. Instructions to the curator as follows: Selection of two feature-length films of near identical duration; selection based on further consideration of the festival’s thematic program Film Without Film with film; do not reveal the source material either to the artists or public. The films soundtracks were replaced by an original composition by Douglas J. Cuomo and performed by cellist Dirk Wietheger who doubled as the audience’s escort between screening rooms. The expanded cinema potential the artists pried open in the era of DCP facilitated, according to Erika Balsom’s Artforumreview of the event, an interrogation of “what philosopher Nelson Goodman called the allographic nature of cinema: it is a two-stage art that requires a performative enactment in order to be realized, something that necessarily opens the work to difference, fluctuation, and modification even as it remains itself.”

The UMW Media Wall artists for the month of December are Eliane Lima, Rui Hu, Eden Mitsenmacher, Aaron Bowles, Shelley Jordon, and S/N.

Eliane Lima is a Brazilian emerging artist. She immigrated to the U.S. in 1999, and received a BA in Cinema from Binghamton University, State University of New York and a Master of Fine Arts in Film from San Francisco Art Institute. Currently, she is working on her second Master’s degree at the California Institute of The Arts. Lima’s work has been shown at Liverpool Biennial, SFMOMA, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archives, Brazil, Cuba, Canada, and elsewhere. She was awarded the SF Weekly Mastermind 2012 prize and featured an installation in homage to George Kuchar at the SF Art Pad 2012.

Eden Mitsenmacher – Born 1987 in the USA; works in London and Tel Aviv. Combines performance, video and installation to take a critical yet engaging view of social, political and cultural issues. Holds a BFA from Goldsmiths College University of London and an MFA from the Dutch Art Institute. Her work has been exhibited in spaces such as Istanbul Biennial, the Van Abbe Museum in the Netherlands, Holon Design Museum, Liverpool Biennial, Arebyte Gallery London and ACRE TV.

The UMW Media Wall artists for the month of November are Casilda Sánchez and Simon Tarr.

Born in Madrid, Spain, Casilda Sánchez holds a Masters Degree in Film, Video and New Media by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives and works in Brooklyn. Her work has been shown in museums, art centers and galleries such as La Panera (Spain), Ground Floor Biennial at Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), Aspect Ratio Gallery (Chicago), Videonale13 at Kunstmuseum Bonn, or Frac Corse among others.

Simon Tarr is an artist, researcher, and educator in South Carolina. In addition to his films that have been screened in hundreds of film festivals on every continent (yes, even Antarctica), he creates live video shows and immersive environments that he has performed at Carnegie Hall, LaMaMa and around the world from Tokyo to Cairo. His work is available on DVD from Netflix and Amazon. Tarr is an associate professor of art at the University of South Carolina where he is the coordinator of the Media Arts degree program in the School of Visual Art and Design. He received the 2010 University Film and Video Association Teaching Award for achievements in pedagogy that contribute to the field of film and video education.
http://quarknova.com

The Long Way Down
(8m45s loop/silent/BW/single-channel)
A ghostly image of woman climbs endlessly to—somewhere. The loop evolves mathematically as more and more of her ascends and ascends.

Stop. Wait. Wait. Observe. Absorb. Partake. This is the simple, but attention-demanding process that underlies my practice. I explore video as a way of expanding space through time, transforming movement into choreography and gesture into narrative. Through the use of large-scale projections I examine the territories of absorption and desire as forces to transcend what is in front of us, incorporating looking as my main tool and vehicle to achieve intimacy with the portrayed subject. Through sustained and detailed close-ups, what would have normally been overlooked becomes visible, unlocking a fleeting moment into a vast space of micro narratives. Within this new immersive environment, everyday experience is reduced to a minimum, serving to highlight the moment when human becomes animal and natural elements a breathing being.

High Tide
HD video, 19’27”, loop, 2013

High Tide is a close-up view of a gypsum-based material soaking water, cracking and transforming from powder to liquid state. It is the pre-process of the material changing from a mineral to a liquid with the necessary consistency to be able to function as modeling material for a new body.

The close and quiet view of such material and its changes becomes the view of an abstract landscape that has lost a reference to scale, becoming either a micro space, or the sight of a wide geological formation crumbling.

Y el mar se negó a ser tierra (and the sea refused to be land)
8 channel video and audio installation, dimensions variable, 2014

Still Feeling Blue About Colour Separation

This film rephotographs over 200 internet-sourced images of ‘Macbeth ColorChecker’ cards on to super-8mm cyanotype emulsion. Macbeth Cards (precision tools in colour film processing), were a popular accessory for small-gauge Kodachrome filmmakers in the 1970’s. They have since been re-adopted by contemporary digital photographers, who use them to compare lighting scenarios on internet blogs and forums.

Tracing the history of the colour calibration card through many lenses, I effectively remove all colours, save one.

Parallel (January-May)

The place of childhood,
of maturity.
Hearing, moving,
thinking, doing.
Act of nothing,
seeing,
listening.
And with light,
time travels parallel.

“Parallel” was shot and recorded between January and March of 2014. The film acts as a personal document of time spent between Ithaca, NY and South Orange, NJ.

Occurrences of Light

A memory.
Present, passing,
Lucid, opaque,
Reflections, recollections,
Occurrences of Light.