Cassandra Troyan is a poet, filmmaker, and artist from Chicago. Spectacle is proud to present a selection of Cassandra’s work from since 2011; a selection of short films, as well as a feature-length experimental pieces. Cassandra’s work, in the artist’s own words, “develops out of a deep curiosity for uncovering situations of trauma in the every day.”
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10 – 7:30 PM & 10 PM – **Cassandra Troyan in person!**
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 25 – 7:30 PM & 10 PM
PROGRAM 1:
YOU SEEK FOLLOWERS? SEEK ZEROS.
Dir. Cassandra Troyan, 2013-2015
USA, 88 min.
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10 – 7:30 PM – DIRECTOR IN PERSON
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 25 – 7:30 PM
WHERE THE SUN NEVER SHINES
(HD Video, 37:42, 2013)
A hysterico-environmental dreamworld set at the edges of capitalism, WHERE THE SUN NEVER SHINES, cycles through endless rabbit holes of Midwest despair and absurdity only to find further economic collapse, failure of masculinity, the ever-present bee plight, psychological trauma. This post-utopian rust-belt drama exists in a landscape where destruction is a form of creative release.
WHERE THE SUN NEVER SHINES is part of the A CURE FIT FOR A KING series. Featuring performances by Fred Schmidt-Arenales, Katherine Harvath, Eero Somers, Paul Gerard Somers, Cassandra Troyan and Danny Volk.
MY DAUGHTER, NEVER MORE
(HD Video, TBA, 2015)
A hummingbird never returns. Anticipation, rage, and melodramatic ecstasy take the stage through longing’s articulation in the spheres of opera, historical monuments, and animals at rest as ciphers for intuited knowledge. A capacitative zoology, never questioning the tongue. I love you daughter, until you betray me.
THE WHOLE FORMS A SYNDROME
(HD Video, 12:19, 2013)
THE WHOLE FORMS A SYNDROME, is a meditation on the mediated subject gone raw, as this work explores residual matter in the politics of resistance, and what it means to be out of sync, in opposition. Historical vamping of prominent figures of authority (a gay Nietzsche, Slavoj Zizek, the Godfather, Karl Marx) this work questions the nature of collectivity and radical gestures as a correspondence between Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse interrogates the practice of theory put into violence. The performance of the political experienced as a trace, as the AK-47 that gets brandished, is the same weapon shooting a barely visible target, the punctures marked only by puffs of dust and hot shells flying out of the weapon in a soundscape of explosions.
DUSK AT THE GALLOWS
(HD Video, 24:18, 2013)
A Tuscan horror film pared down to its affective tropes, both in the Italian landscape and filmic genre. Cinematic feelings are constructed out of the remnants of a quotidian world, making it all the more terrifying by what is hidden, and what is revealed. Torture, allure, mystery, and the sacred create an unconventional narrative where the characters’ motives might unfold, yet the viewer can only experience them as a series of traces. The women are left as ruptures surfacing in the residue of an environment, attempting to voice some desired intensity, violence, or hysteria until they are stifled and pushed into another unknown world.
What is to be feared within this terrain? Must the element causing terror always surface, or reveal itself like the monster or psychopath lurking around the shadowy corner? Or might it exist in some other semblance of meaning, remaining visually unrepresentable? In DUSK AT THE GALLOWS, what cannot be seen holds the greatest threat, and means for discovering a deeper notion of trauma and historical violence in the dark heart of Italy’s mysterious influence.
Performances by (in order of appearance): Kirsten Bockrath, Cody Troyan, Sarah Mendelsohn, Danielle Rosen, Nausicaa Renner, Katherine Harvath, Sophia Rhee, and Chelsea America Torres.
I WAS HAPPY THEN
(HD Video, 14:48, 2013)
The Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni made “L’eclisse” in 1962. The film begins at dawn on a summer morning inside a modernist apartment located on the suburban fringes of Rome. In the opening scene a beautiful young literary translator named Vittoria ends a relationship with her writer lover, Riccardo. Riccardo’s final plea: he only wanted to make her happy. Vittoria listlessly responds, “When we first met, I was 20 years old. I was happy then.” She subsequently emerges alone from his home into a barren, interstitial landscape. For the remainder of the film Vittoria is a tourist figure traversing the urban, architectural and economic landscapes of Rome.
“I was happy then” is both a book and film by Bureau for Open Culture that unites the filmic spaces of Antonioni’s “L’eclisse” and the present-day reality of Siena, Italy. Through the framework of a tourist guide that focuses on the topics of alienation, architecture, economy, love and urbanization, this work drawn from research and lived experience is a means to explore postwar and contemporary life in Siena.
Produced by Bureau for Open Culture with support by the Siena Art Institute in Siena, Italy.
PROGRAM 2:
WITH THE TRUE WORLD WE ABOLISHED THE WORLD WE HAD HERE
Dir. Cassandra Troyan, 2011-2015
USA, 95 min.
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10 – 10 PM – DIRECTOR IN PERSON
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 25 – 10 PM
THE SACRIFICIAL TEMPTATION OF THE VOID (AS NIGHT SLOWLY FALLS, WE MAKE LOVE)
(HD Video, 01:14:08, 2012)
THE SACRIFICIAL TEMPTATION OF THE VOID (AS NIGHT SLOWLY FALLS, WE MAKE LOVE) explores the terror of becoming female amidst the accelerated haze of contemporary popular culture. Through evoking potentially abject worlds of ecstasy and pain within rap culture, Gothic fetishism, and 90s music videos, the film looks for ways to derive pleasure from the horror in surrender, and the romance in submission.
Sound production and mastering by Andrew Rahman
Featuring performances by Rachel Ellison, Nabiha Khan, David Giordano, and Cody Troyan
GROAN
(HD Video, 6:13, 2011)
Repetition makes its own meaning as a reflection is a kind of soundtrack. Soaring voices of The Red Army Soviet Choir inflect a visual landscape that is at once stroboscopic as it is clear. Selection from the full album and video of its unfolding.
RENDER ME THIS BLOODY HAND
(HD Video, TBA, 2015)
A soldier removed from the domain of war, a hunter searching for authenticity on an atavistic terrain. He is wandering, wanting to know what it would mean to return.
RENDER ME THIS BLOODY HAND is part of the A CURE FIT FOR A KING series. Featuring performances by Fred Schmidt-Arenales, and Paul Gerard Somers.
THE PUSH TO PULL THE FLOW FROM LIFE’S DISTURBANCE (TERROR FANTASIA)
(HD Video, 05:18, 2012)
The nausea.
A scene constructed out of a negatively saturated world. There is a frontal collide of two figures at a table which explodes into another set of figures performing a strange play-acting on the beach. Gestures of abandon shown by gleefully running and rolling in the sand builds a desirous landscape reminiscent of 90s music video tropes only to morph into the stickiness of rap. What is more absurd than wanting to be that which you cannot be? Of having to find one’s self in a language that is not just indecipherable, but the code is the language itself. It is only in using the language that initially seems foreign, can one begin to translate.
Featuring performances by Rachel Ellison, Nabiha Khan, and Cassandra Troyan.
WHEN WE DOZE OFF IN THE BLAZE (PLEASURE THROES)
(HD Video, 10:32, 2011)
Where does desire exist within the absurd, as a suburban backyard becomes an emotional landscape of both accumulation and disappearance? Screams turn to black, darkness dims fire, as the viewer is implicated in a potential world of familiar yet pleasured terror.
Featuring performances by Cody Troyan and Lawrence Troyan.
