NEW CURATORIAL PROJECTS
4th Annual Festival: With Jan Bartozsek of Hedwig Dances, I am co-curating the 4th annual Dance for the Camera festival, to be presented at the Chicago Cultural Center in October 2010.
A New Festival: Dance Films Kino, curated by Sarah Best and co-presented by Links Hall, is a multiweek festival of international dance film work, to be presented in a built environment that invokes the "kinos" or private film clubs of the 1920s. The festival (spring 2011, venue tbd) will celebrate innovative collaborations between movement artists and filmmakers and will engage a broad range of local visual artists, theatermakers and others in the task of creating an environment in which to see film in.
The festival invokes the spirit of Dgiza Vertov, who innovated novel film editing techniques, rejecting linear narrative in a quest to develop a pure cinematic language that is divorced from literature and theater. His film "Man with a Movie Camera" (1929) embraced a broad range of movement, from quotidian rituals and pedestrian gestures, to the movement of machines, to the choreography of ballet dancers on a stage, to the speed and movement of film itself. This festival recognizes the parallels between Vertov's work and the work of contemporary dance filmmakers, who are developing innovative, cross-genre collaborations that embrace diverse forms of movement.
Logo design by Jon Damaschke
RECENT PHOTOGRAPHY
RECENT SHOW: DAILY PHOTOS
Daily Photos was shown at Antena Gallery in Pilsen, Chicago, in February 2010 and at Paper Boy in Lakeview, Chicago, in May 2010.
Shot almost exclusively with a cell phone camera, Daily Photos captures people in my circle of friends and acquaintances--artists and writers, musicians and dance artists, and avid cyclists--and puts the viewer in a position where he or she feels like an intimate equal. Other images --layered, painterly, and abstract--are a physical response to my environment. Multiple shots of the same subject create the sense of approaching, circling, or passing something, and crystallize the feeling of being in real space and time.
Two points of inspiration for this project are Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems (1964), which capture fleeting moments in a conversational tone that can belie the poem's underlying formal structure, and Robert Mapplethorpe's Polaroids (1970-75), which are similarly intimate and immediate.
The cell phone camera, which produces images that can be viewed and shared instantaneously, but which are necessarily limited and flawed, is the contemporary equivalent of the Polaroid camera.
The emotion, mood, and even texture in a photo taken on a cell phone would be no small task, and an impossible one for someone lacking the talent Best no doubt has in spades--an eye for a moment. Hers is an eye always open and a finger always on the trigger. -- Carrie McGath, Chicago Art Magazine
DAILY PHOTOS PRESS
"Pondering the Universe at Antena Gallery." Review. Carrie McGath, Chicago Art Magazine (blog).
"Pocket Pix: Chicago Area Photogs use iPhone camera, applications for art." Hermine Bloom, Columbia Chronicle.
"In an Instant." Emily Reimer, University of Chicago Magazine (blog).
"Top 5 Weekend Picks". Stephanie Burke, Bad at Sports.
"Five Things to Do on February 19," Time Out Chicago (blog).
"Cell Phone Photography is SO 2010." Kelly Reaves, Gapers Block A/C.
WITH MANY THANKS TO
Debbie & Howard Best, Andy Best, Mark Wilson, Bryan Saner, Irène Hodes, Ira Murfin, Richard Fox, Eric Bork, Thon Lorenz, David Schalliol, Brock Rumer, Nell Taylor, Anne Holub, Zachary Whittenberg, Ira Murfin, Asimina Chremos, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Georgina Valverde, Eric Brasure, Brent Wegscheid, Sage Reed, Leo Rodriguez, Joanna Lakatos, Danielle Kleinenberg, and Miguel Cortez.
BIO & ARTIST'S STATEMENT ( CV )
I am a graduate of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU, where I studied poetry with Scott Hightower and David Lehman (an expert on Frank O'Hara and the New York School of Poetry), took studio art classes, and eventually developed a concentration in literature, cultural studies, and ideological systems. This academic work laid a foundation for approaching diverse threads of creative inquiry from a multidisciplinary perspective.
I work in the media of photography, illustration, and stitched illustration (embroidery). My photography has been featured on the websites of Chicago Art Magazine, Bad at Sports, Chicago Public Radio, the Chicago Reader, Chicagoist, Gapers Block and the Columbia Chronicle.
I have a strong interest in capturing bodies in motion (including my own) in my work. In my Daily Photos series, multiple shots of the same subject create the sense of approaching, circling, or passing something in my environment, and crystallize the feeling of being in real space and time.
My work often intersects with performance, in terms of my process, the subjects I am interested in portraying, and the artists that I choose to collaborate with. I have studied methods of devising and documenting performance with Goat Island and other Chicago-based performance groups. In addition to having produced numerous dance performances, I have drawn and photographed dance, have written about dance for Time Out Chicago, and with Jan Bartoszek, have curated an annual festival of dance on film.
Born in rural Pennsylvania, I lived in New York and London before moving to Chicago, where I currently reside. I spent half of my childhood imagining countries that I'd never been to, and the other half learning how to see my small town, my childhood home, and the nautral environment that I grew up in, in the greatest possible detail. Fantasties of places I've never been to, memories of places I've inhabited, and a hypersensitive awareness of my environment, and my physical and emotional presence within it, are themes that continue to surface in my work.
A RUNNING LIST OF THINGS I LIKE
- Georges Perec, master of lists and catalogs
- Maps
- Raver Emanuel, multidisiplinary artist, collaborator
- Zines and Artists Books
- Goat Island Performance Group
- Quimby's, zine bookshop
- Chicago Underground Library, zine library
- Raymond Williams, cultural theorist
- David Byrne, singer, artist
- Wallace Shawn, playwright
- Frank O'Hara, poet
- Elizabeth Bishop, poet
- Links Hall, performance space
- David Hockney, painter, photographer, really sees trees, experiments with new & old technologies
- Unnaturally blue postcards
- Pigma micron pens
- Gerhard Richter, painter
- APICA CD15 notebooks
- Cell phone cameras
- Going to the opera
- Lillstreet Arts Center, art center
- Antena, art gallery
- Dinner parties
- Roni Horn, visual artist
- Synapse Arts Collective, performance company, collaborators
- Robert LePage, theater maker, opera maker
- Walt Whitman, poet
- Theatre de Complicite, theater company
- Patti Smith, poet, singer, artist
- Molly Shanahan / Mad Shak, dance maker
- Hedwig Dances, dance company
- Lucy Cash, filmmaker and dance maker
- Robert Alexander, photographer
- Trisha Brown, dance maker