UCSD Open Studios: UCSD MFA Open Studios Film Screening 2008

UCSD MFA Open Studios Film Screening 2008

Friday, April 4th
4pm-6pm
Visual Arts Performance Space

Robert Becraft
Essentially, this is a collage film, not in the traditional avant-guarde sense, albeit in an entirely oppositional sense. Oppositional, especially to what I view as the prevalent orientation of animation towards iconography over its inherent mechanism-----in my mind, inescapably a precinct of an irregular representation that is an induction of and resistance to a kind of immanent purity and "photographic objectivity." I straight-forwardly attribute this to animation's both substitutive and illusory formation, and its use of photography.

Richard Bott
Mind-bendingly inventive experiments in uncanny, surreal montage that defy logical analysis. Rich's work is a tour de force of incongruous juxtapositions, startling dislocations and ingenious visual rhymes assembled from the banal detritus of late night TV.

Micha C�rdenas
The Circus of (Im)Migration took place in the spring of 2007. The traveling circus was an uncircus performed by the Boredom Patrol of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army and volunteers and workshop participants in every city. The performance consisted of 3 acts: act one about the circus, act two about our personal stories about borders and act three about the immigration raids taking place around the US.

Cathy De La Cruz
de la Cruz is both a thorough researcher and participant in mainstream and subcultural female culture. Her work often revolves around the interplay between memory and fantasy.

Monica Duncan
Working in live performance, print and video, Duncan is concerned with transformative activity where the body serves as a conduit in space, constructing the perception of time. Her art practice is mainly collaborative, examining personal and collective identity in relationship to the narrative process, and the transitional landscape.

Deanna Erdmann
Deanna Erdmann�s experimental video work, Shave, explores gender, intimacy and the imaginary space of sound and time. As her subjects inhabit their �private� outdoor environment, seemingly disparate sound and action meld to create a sense of the uncanny in this familiar, perhaps even generic, landscape. The result is an intimate and sexually charged grooming session that evokes �traditional� narratives of gay male porn while staking territory in the realm of contemporary queer story telling.

Nico Herbst
As darkness sets in, a window becomes a portal to the previous day. What appeared to be an opening to the outside slowly reveals itself to be a window into the past. As the illusion begins to break down, a tension emerges between surface and screen, inside and outside, past and present. A solitary being surfaces, masked by the elements that surround him.

Kate Hoffman
The Baltimore project consists of three parts; a sculpture, a projected diorama, and an animation. The project titled, "A Monument to Good Intentions" evolved from the experience of a mugging, growing into an investigation of the variables that surrounded the event. Rather than asking the questions of "why" and "how", the narrative of the incident is complicated through a theoretical and literal zooming in and out of the moment of the mugging. This gesture of crime in Baltimore becomes a vantage point from which to produce a variety of readings of the city, across urban, geological, architectural and personal histories; where violence and desire converge.

Merve Kayan
I am currently working on completing Elope, a film about the journey of an adolescent.

Dolissa Medina
An interpretation of the mythic story Prometheus using 16mm educational found footage from the 1970s.

Gretchen Mercedes
No girls...testosterone fuelled worlds...smells like salt, diesel and blood...locked on top deck sleeping in warm monsoon rain...hit reef at night...standing in black ocean...waiting for rising tide...swell picking up...motion in motion...time in time.

Charles Miller
Culminating as a time-based 'diagram', the first 2 installments of the HOLLYWOOD SHOWER series leverage upon the documentation process to underline life-lived as life-performed. The projects attempt to define a graphic, phenomenological surrogate (so far, gallon jugs of generic drinking water, and / or the puddle they could produce) for spatial and energetic resources to which one (western, middleclass) does not question her/his entitlement, and, for all intents and purposes, only has an abstract relationship to.

Elyse Montague
This fictional experimental narrative follows the journey of a young transgender person's return to his hometown in rural Maine after learning of his ex-partner's sudden death in a car accident. Owls Head animates the intimate bodies of one's past, relating the memories of a lover's body to the bodies imagined and realized by queer fantasy.

Owen Mundy
The grandson of Indiana farmers and once a photographer in the Navy, his work considers issues of class, middle America, and the relationship between art and all potential audiences.

Kelly Pendergrast
This film combines stop-motion animation and live action, and has morphed into a meditation on crowd politics, bodily propinquity, and the hysterical group.

Omar Pimienta
Personal-geography driven: social landscapes, interconnections, diversity, image and imaginarios.

Katherine Sweetman
Her current work deals with online social networking sites and the issues surrounding personal disclosure in the public realm of the World Wide Web.

Rachel Thompson
Loris emerges out of an idiosyncratic, movement-based improvisational practice with the violin, wherein a conscious shift in intention redirects my efforts away from the desire to produce specific sonic results, towards the creation of new patterns of physical interaction with the instrument. Rather than viewing my body from the external, distanced perspective of the audience, a micro security camera mounted to my finger peers out from the center of action. The final video is slowed to a snail's pace, in part distancing the result from the original source material while bringing a microscopic focus to the nature of the movement, with its contingent sound and image.

UCSD Open Studios Film Screening 2008 Press Release

UCSD MFA Open Studios Film Screening 2008

Artists