TALKS BACK (PT. 2)
Curated by Angela Washko
95 min

MONDAY, DECEMBER 18th
ONE NIGHT ONLY – 7:30PM (WITH Q & A!) and at 10:00
ARTISTS IN ATTENDANCE

TICKETS HERE

Talks Back is a screening program featuring video and performance-for-video works by women artists who have opted to move away from the limitations of gallery contexts and art world audiences and put themselves in conversation with television and cinema (and their audiences). Inspired by the possibilities offered by public access television, reality television and virtual environments, these artists bring new meaning to films, television programming, and multi-user digital spaces by inserting themselves into existing media narratives which don’t often include their perspectives. Through remixing their bodies into found footage or literally getting onto reality television programs, these artists assert the need for the narratives of intersectional feminists in the mainstream media we consume every day.

Artists in the program include Morehshin Allahyari, Ann Hirsch, Narcissister, Rachel Rampleman, Suzie Silver, Skawennati and Angela Washko.

Special thanks to the artists and curator.

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FREEBIRD
Suzie Silver, 1993
11 min

“Suzie Silver directs and performs all the roles in this raucous and hilarious music video rendition of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Freebird”, the infamous Southern rock anthem for an entire generation of 1970s male youth. In this spoof of straight mass culture, Silver flips ironically between roles; from a lesbian proudly proclaiming her sexuality at the Academy Awards, to an in-concert Coors-drinking Ronnie Van Zant, and, finally, to a black-lace lesbian lounge swinger celebrating the wild, colorful world of “out” visibility. Silver draws upon an amazing array of found footage and special effects to bend genders and genres with spectacular visual delight.” – SS

MILLIONAIRE WORTHY: HOME EDITION (A PRIMER)
Angela Washko, 2013
8 min

“Angela Washko explores metrics and seduction in this video work that presents audiences with a strategy for romantic success through data analysis of the Bravo television show Millionaire Matchmaker. The project was the primer video which ultimately led to a public access television show called ‘Millionaire Worthy TV’.

‘Millionaire Worthy’ began as a research project through which the artist watched all 72 of the existing episodes of Millionaire Matchmaker and analyzed exactly what values were being communicated to its viewership by making spreadsheets and graphs detailing what traits men on the show state that they are looking for in women, and what the host declares unacceptable about the women she denies opportunities to date these men. Performing as analyst and (un)qualified authority, Angela Washko attempts to embody Patti Stanger’s teachings…the impossibility of which is made clear by highly contradictory data.” – AW

TIMETRAVELLER™ EPISODE 1 & 2,
Skawennati 2008-2013
6 min & 9 min

“It is critical that Aboriginal people show up in The Future. Sepia-toned, historical images of silent, unnamed Indians are everywhere but rarely do we appear in future imaginaries, even our own. As a Mohawk woman, I believe that we need to visualize ourselves as full participants in the future in order to assume our appropriate role as active agents in the shaping of new mediums and new societies. At the moment, nothing can represent The Future better than a real-time, interactive, 3D space where fantastical people populate improbable architecture and fly, teleport, and telepathically communicate their thoughts and dreams. Second Life, the popular virtual world, is such a space. How do Indigenous people fit into such spaces? And, more importantly, what is our role in defining those spaces? TimeTraveller™ is a creative and critical intervention into such discussions. TimeTraveller™ is a 9-part machinima that tells the story of Hunter, an angry young Mohawk man living in the 22nd century. Despite his impressive range of traditional skills, Hunter is unable to find his way in an overcrowded, hyperconsumerist, technologized world. He decides to use his edutainment system, his TimeTraveller™, to learn about his heritage. Through a bizarre glitch in the system, he meets Karahkwenhawi, a young Mohawk woman from our present. Together they criss-cross time, and end up discovering the complexity of history, truth, and love.” – S

IN THE REALM OF RARE AND ANALOGOUS ACCIDENTS
Morehshin Allahyari, 2013
10 min

Side by Side; Searching for a relationship that defines the states of belonging; The space in the middle. Questioning the power of the image… the image that guides us. The image that lies. “Something is of course always lost when we get to see only one side. It is for the exact same reason that one must have the courage to confess the pain of the coma-like contrast of life and cinema. In this scenario, somehow we must put it all together to see the big picture; While in the state of unconsciousness, we are stuck at the thin edge of a screen where two worlds, two countries, and two cities separate for the sake of it. I feel helpless standing in the middle. In this chain of accidents, in this battle of guns and bombs, in the pile of my notes, thoughts, and nostalgic memories of Texas and Tehran, the world lacks trust in common sense.” -M

{intermission}

HERE FOR YOU
Ann Hirsch, 2010
14 min

“In 2010 I was cast on the Vh1 reality dating series Frank the Entertainer…In a Basement Affair. I was one of fifteen female contestants vying for the heart of Frank “The Entertainer” Maresca, a thirty-year-old unemployed reality show mainstay, as we all lived in a house with Frank and his parents. I consider my time on the show a performance but I have also made work from the experience as well to recontextualize my experience for an art audience. Here For You combines footage from my reality TV experience, original video, and secret audio I captured during my in person audition. Edited to appear almost as a dream, this video explores the supposed sincerity that was assigned to my character during the show, questions the romantic nature of my relationship with Frank, and explores my mental state during the filming of the show and afterwards.” – AH

HOT LUNCH
Narcissister, 2009
4 min

“Narcissister employs a spectacle-rich approach to explorations of gender, racial identity, and sexuality. Humor, pop songs, elaborate costumes, contemporary dance, and her trademark mask are her tools in deconstructing stereotypical representations. Narcissister questions fetishism, particularly sexual fetishism, which is notorious in its fixing of racist and gendering stereotypes. Rather than abandon this contaminated site, Narcissister dives headlong into the muck, into the depths of the fantasy and fetish itself, to expose and deconstruct their power.” – N

UPSIDE DOWN ON AMERICA’S GOT TALENT
Narcissister, 2011
3 min

“People might ask, ‘Why is she interested in these low brow possibilities? Why is she diluting her work? What about the politics’ Is it possible to be strongly political and appear on these talent competitions? I think it’s radical that I would want my work to be seen on such a huge platform. If one aspires to show only in the art world, who is going to see their work? Elitist culture, people already in the know, who are already liberal. To be able to reach all kind of people- different classes, ages groups – feels righteous. And I’m protected by the mask. Narcissister can always only be a mirror of what’s around her.” – N

POISON (MY SISTER FUCKED BRET)
Rachel Rampleman, 2006
31 min

“Rachel Rampleman’s Poison (My Sister Fucked Bret) is a 30-minute video account of the artist’s younger sister Sarah’s early childhood introduction to, and later teenage interactions with, Bret Michaels – lead singer of ’80s hair-metal / glam-rock band Poison. With Poison music video clips interspersed throughout, a now (circa 2006) adult Sarah, living as the single mother of a toddler, shares her vivid and hilarious recollections of her multiple encounters with Bret, which eventually culminated in her spending a deeply unsatisfying weekend with the object of her decade-long obsession at his “cheesy” mansion in Tennessee. Shot solely and claustrophobically within Sarah’s 2006 Kentucky home, the stories relayed in this video convey in excruciating detail the experience of being a naïve and self-conscious adolescent in the suburban Midwest in the throes of total rock-idol worship, followed by the thrill and excitement, then ultimately the bittersweet disappointment, that actually getting to meet one’s idol can entail.” – RR

UNSINKABLE: MY HEART WILL GO ON
dir. [Name of Director]
live score / video collage

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 19 – 7:30 AND 10:00 PM

TICKETS HERE

Even after two decades, [year of blockbuster] blockbuster [name of blockbuster] remains indelibly etched into the collective consciousness. Originally released to breathless acclaim, 14 Oscar nominations, and 11 wins including Best Picture, and endlessly repeat theater visits by teenage viewers, the movie lingers in the memories of many, accompanied a deep-seated shame at knowing every note in “[title of canadian soundtrack pop hit]”.

Join us on the twentieth anniversary of [name of blockbuster]’s debut for a live reconstruction of [blockbusting director]’s unsinkable creation. With visual processing by Sleepy Peopl and an improvised score by Cyrus, [EVENT NAME] is a 30-minute voyage into the unknown, a wreckage that will go on and on.

Cyrus is Maggie Drew Brennan and members of Tar Of. Maggie is a city-based visual, audial dilettante. Tar Of play experimental pop and electronic textures, and recently discovered a shared past obsession with a certain cinematic experience.

Sleepy Peopl piece together live video projections from found and created materials and one of them has still never seen TITA–[film in question].

DROID
dir. Philip O’Toole
USA, 1988

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 1 – MIDNIGHT
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 8 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 9 – 5 PM

For anyone who found BLADE RUNNER 2049’s perfume-ad gloss just a little too savory, DROID offers up a smokey, neon underworld of trashy dive bars, virginal sex robots, and trombone masturbation. Though it masqueraded as a sci-fi feature directed by “Peter Williams” upon its VHS release, the film is actually entirely comprised of footage form two hardcore porn films by Philip O’Toole, CABARET SIN (1987) and EMPIRE OF THE SINS (1988), but with anything explicit excised. Influenced by the likes of CAFE FLESH and LIQUID SKY, and with a plot lifted wholesale from BLADE RUNNER, DROID is some admirably audacious future sleaze even as it trips all over itself to cut to disguise the fact that it originated purely as a vehicle for sex, repeatedly cutting to some totally inexplicable images along the way.

The (discernible) story takes place in a future LA overrun by leather-clad, depraved police robots called Reformers. A human cop named Taylor, brought in for one last job and somehow sounding even more hungover and world-weary than Harrison Ford in his expository voicover, is pitted against them in the search for a stolen “decoder” (“where is the dee-coder?” Taylor frequently barks). Between the film’s countless lounge act interludes, there’s a perfectly enjoyable Vangelis-knockoff synth score credited to the grammatically suspect “Cinema Symphony’s.”

THE FLOWER THIEF
dir. Ron Rice, 1960
59 min, USA
In English

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 1 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 3 – 5 PM
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 8 – MIDNIGHT
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 16 – 07:30 PM

TICKETS HERE

Special thanks to the Filmmakers Coop!

Spectacle favorite Taylor Mead (NO SUCH THING AS GRAVITY, CANDY AND DADDY) stars in Ron Rice’s ode to meandering afternoons – THE FLOWER THIEF.

Mead wanders around the city getting in scrapes with kids, literally stopping to smell the flowers, and eventually kidnapped by cowboys all set atop the grain of surplus 16mm film – rumored to be leftover from the army’s ariel-machine-gun-camera stock.

Rice and Mead met in sunny/smokey San Francisco and together, sometimes along with Jack Smith, made a number of dharma-bum/beat pics before Rice’s untimely death at only 29. Parker Tyler compared Rice’s romps to that of the Marx Brothers. In a perfect summation Light Industry’s Ed Halter quips – “Today, Mead’s Flower Thief uniform—tight hoodie, button-down shirt, three-stripe tennis shoes, and beat-up jeans—can be seen on many an L-train habitué, en route to neo-Bowery facsimilies of post-war cafés, and so the parody has been reversed; such are our own meticulous restorations of the fantasies of other people’s youth.”

A BUCKET OF BLOOD
Roger Corman, 1959.
USA, 66 min.

MONDAY, DECEMBER 4 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 10 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 15 – MIDNIGHT

TICKETS HERE

Chump janitor Walter Paisley spends all day surrounded by beatniks, jazz musicians, artists and their groupies at hip coffee shop The Yellow Door. He desperately aspires to the life of an artist, but hasn’t got an ounce of talent. What he does have is an accidentally dead cat, a lump of clay, and a vague idea…. When Walter’s new ‘sculpture’ makes him an overnight sensation, all the rats come out of the woodwork to get a piece of the action, and Walter’s forced to find more ‘subjects’ for his art. It’s a fast-paced Corman classic that manages sympathy for its hapless murderer while skewering the art world around him.

BEAT GIRL
AKA Wild For Kicks
Dir. Edmund T. Gréville, 1960
UK, 85 min.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 3 – 7:30 PM
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 7 – 10:00 PM
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 12 – 10:00 PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 16 – MIDNIGHT

TICKETS HERE

Beat goes to England in this over-the-top tale of a poor little rich girl rebelling against her wealthy dad’s remarriage. Why does the local stripper seem to recognize her new stepmom? Will the strip-club owner (played with oily perfection by Christopher Lee) get his hands on the young wildcat? Are drinking and fighting really for squares? With plenty of music, kicks, and nihilism for the disillusioned kids who survived the Blitz.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 17 – 10 PM **WITH DIRECTOR Q AND A!!**
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 28 – 7:30 PM

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LIFEPAK
12 Min. 16mm
B&W, 1990

A night with an ambulance crew. A race between life and death.
“Lifepak” was chosen as one of ten works for the German Short Film Award.

PATH
13 Min. 16mm
B&W, 1991

A fixed brain is cut into slices like a ripe pineapple. Heads are opened and guts are prepared for the post-mortem examination. The preparator opens a body and a young female doctor dissects a fetus. The comments in the film are like guards, which lead you through the images. Early in their careers, the pathology workers reported having extreme fascination and at the same time emotional difficulty with their vocation. In many cases they lost their friend and were labeled “butchers” as a result of their chosen profession. The film gives a precise and clinical look behind the iron doors of a pathology lab. The pictures are shocking. They touch deep-set fears.

KILL THE ARTIST
40 Min. DV
Color, 2007

KILL THE ARTIST is a documentary about artists who got into trouble with the law because of their art-works.

Mike Diana was indicted in his home state of Florida for indecency. He was charged with three counts of obscenity in 1994, spent time in prison and was not allowed to draw for three years. In 2003, after fleeing to New York, Mike showed his artwork in a secret exhibition in Brooklyn. Diana says of the experience: “In a way it was almost flattering that they would feel so strongly. I felt that my artwork must have been effective.

In the film Richard Kern says, “We wanted it to be as hard as possible. The only restriction we had was, who would do what we wanted to be done.”

While in the western world violent life like re-enactments of rape and death on film thrive, investigative Journalist and author Yaron Svoray, explains in the film that the reality of sex crimes show how cheap life really can be. His investigation of snuff-movies leads him into the war in Bosnia. As Svoray explains: “Eventually two or three girls are pulled into a classroom and there is a communal rape. When it’s finished, one of the guys just says, ‘kill the bitches.’”

Kill The Artist reveals the extreme measures lawmakers and critics go through to censure avant-garde artists who walk the fine line between art, perversion, religion and devious sexual behavior.

Using never before seen footage along with rare films from Richard Kern, Nick Zedd and German filmmakers Jörg Buttgereit and Olaf Ittenbach, Kill The Artist takes a look at the ultimate power play – Sex and Death.