Films and videos by Cauleen Smith.

What narratives constitute the popular reaction to the events of September 11 and the prevalent politics and aesthetics thereafter? During the last week of July, curator Zachary Kaplan will occupy Golden Age during business hours to discuss these ideas and more through a variety of media and activities. This approach is intended to stoke and evaluate interpretations of the attack’s evolving influence on the popular culture. To launch the project, Kaplan will discuss the aesthetics of conspiracy and screen Charles Irvin's video Membrane Lane and excerpts from popular videos such as Loose Change: An American Coup (Second Edition) and 911 Taboo. ...

The Humboldt Moving Picture Show presents a program of over 25 artists’ interpretations of the moving picture. An outdoor screening will be held at sunset in the Sideyard at Richmond Manor, while experimental videos, films and animations will also be installed in the apartment. Curators Stephanie Nadeau and Amira Hanafi use Richmond Manor not as a gallery, but as a domestic space that retains its character: the intact living room is a site for conversation around the TV; garage windows are animated by video installations; at a desk a viewer contemplates images of abandoned offices. The outdoor screening transforms an empty ...

A closing reception for David Price and Andy Roche’s silent Super 8 film series where we will be screening all four of their collaborative films from the project titled 2001-2010: Bardic Visions from Britain and the Americas / Hands Across the Water.

This one goes out to all of you fans of mimes, Frozen Moments, The Festival of Living Art episode of the Gilmore Girls, paintings that stare back and Gallery 400's three current exhibitions of works by Eun Hyung Kim, Andy Moore and Erin Cosgrove. In response to all of the drawn tableaux present in the latter and as part of a more generalized attempt to rethink the still life as a movement-image (Eric Fleischauer), your time-based pals Jesse McLean and Ben Russell have gathered together a series of films and videos that are certain to unstick you ...

A program of work by noted Chicago/Toronto artist Steve Reinke.

5 durational performances based on 4 accounts of 1 event. Video by Georgia Wall. Performances by Vicki Fowler, Millie Kapp, Isabella Ng, Libby O'Bryan, Ali Scott and Hannah Verrill.

Both in form and in function, Ryan Trecartin’s video practice advances understandings of post-millennial technology, narrative, and identity, while also propelling these matters as expressive mediums. His work depicts worlds where consumer culture and interactive systems are amplified to absurd or nihilistic proportions and characters circuitously strive to find agency and meaning in their lives. The combination of assaultive, nearly impenetrable avant-garde logics and equally outlandish virtuoso uses of color, form, drama, and montage produces a sublime, stream-of-consciousness effect that feels bewilderingly true to life. This evening, as part of a special two-part presentation organized by the Visiting Artists ...

The films of British artist Emily Wardill are brilliant cinematic labyrinths. Visually striking and playfully rigorous, they draw upon an array of sources– underground theater, psychoanalytic case studies, the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Rancière, and even the game logic of Nintendo Wii–to pose fundamental questions about vision, representation, and media and their role in how we come to know ourselves. Wardill has been the recipient of much recent critical acclaim: Tate Modern film curator Stuart Comer rated her film The Diamond (Descartes’ Daughter) (2008) as one of his top ten picks of 2008 and The Guardian newspaper deemed ...

A program of short video works dealing with performances of cultural identity. In navigating complicated understandings of gender, race, class, sexuality, or existence in on- and off-line spaces, individuals accept and internalize cultural rules or ideologies and pass; reject them, identifying such performances as a form of cultural oppression; or even scramble and combine rules and codes in personalized constructions. Performance Anxiety (run time: approximately 50 minutes) features the work of American artists Rochelle Feinstein, Kate Gilmore, James Murray, Jeroen Nelemans, Greg Stimac and Stacia Yeapanis. Curated by Alicia Eler and Jefferson Godard.

While the MFA program at the University of Illinois at Chicago is relatively small, it provides an intimate site for the exchange of ideas and methods of working. This screening consists of a selection of moving image work from the 2010 graduating class, featuring films and videos by Olivia Ciummo, Nick Harvey, Rebecca Mir, Michael Morris, Orson Panetti and Michael Sirianni. These works construct a kind of portrait of this educational microcosm, visiting themes of loss, longing, doubt, transcendence and light.

Chicago, IL claims as its own a plethora of hardworking film, video, and new-media artists. Since 2008, a rough and ready microcinema called The NIGHTINGALE has been presenting their work. To celebrate the second anniversary of the space, director, Christy LeMaster and her sister, print-maker Jessica LeMaster, are heading out on the roads of the quiet midwest with THE BROAD SHOULDERS TOUR, a showcase of recent Chicago-made work screened at The Nightingale since its opening. The works in THE BROAD SHOULDERS TOUR represent a diversity of mediums and aesthetics but share a similar sensibility. This isn't a city of artists ...

The documentaries of Pavel Medvedev are haunting portraits of some of post-Soviet Russia’s most isolated people and places. This rare screening presents four different facets of Medvedev’s remarkable oeuvre. Vacation in November (2002) follows Russian miners in the tundra. On a forced furlough from their regular jobs, they embark on an annual massive reindeer slaughter to supplement their income. On the Third Planet from the Sun (2006) studies life in the country’s resource-rich Arkhangelsk region, where inhabitants forage for scrap metal left behind from H-bomb testing. Wedding of Silence (2003) depicts a deaf community in St. Petersburg, juxtaposing an expressive ...

CHANNELING is a film and video program curated by Latham Zearfoss and Ethan White. CHANNELING is an entryway into the spirit realm and the queer body politic: a program of experimental moving image work that calls up the ghosts of the past and the specters of the future. The intent of the program is to re-imagine film and video as occult technologies that allow us to connect with the bodies, experiences, and emotions that are often invisible– ghostly, even–in everyday life. Videos by Vanessa Renwick, Elliot Montague, Shana Moulton, Michael Robinson, EMR (Math Bass & Dylan ...

Radical Semantics is a survey of 16mm films by film-makers whose methods stand in opposition to the algorithmic and computer assisted processes that define many contemporary media works. Often working with home-made optics and developing their film in sinks and buckets, these filmmakers create short works that emphasize the expressive and opt for complexity rather than reproducibility and homogeneity. Featuring Eric Stewart, Alex Lake, Ross McFessell, Adam Neese and Randy Sterling Hunter.

In 2006, experimental filmmaker Naomi Uman retraced her great grandparents’ emigration from Eastern Europe in reverse, settling in the tiny village of Legedzine, Ukraine, where she still lives today. The result of her adventures is the quietly picaresque quintet of 16mm films, The Ukrainian Time Machine. In capturing the joys and hardships of her neighbors’ centuries-old way of life– traditions that are eroding with the encroaching pressures of modernity–Uman creates a new kind of living history, fresh with curiosity and verve. In this evening’s program, Uman will present Unnamed Film, her keen documentary about life in Legedzine, cataloging its inhabitants’ ...

The Roots & Culture screening series will feature a program of work recently added to the archive of the Video Data Bank. Focusing on acquisitions from the past year, the program highlights eight pieces spanning a variety of genres and styles. This VDB program has recently screened at several major film festivals, and this Roots & Culture event is an opportunity for the VDB to showcase their new acquisitions in Chicago. Work by Jesse McLean, Sterling Ruby, Dani Levanthal, Jim Finn, Pat Steir, Susan Youssef, Wynne Greenwood & K8 Hardy and ...

The Blindness Series is Los Angeles-based artist Tran, T. Kim-Trang’s expansive, fourteen-years-in-the-making tour de force on vision and its metaphors.  Comprised of eight videos, the series draws upon notions of blindness to explore broader political and cultural themes of identity, sexuality, society, and technology.  This evening, to celebrate the Video Data Bank’s release of The Blindness Series in a new DVD box-set, Tran will present five works from the cycle, including a provocative documentary on hysterical blindness and the Cambodian civil war (ekleipsis, 1998); an essay on cosmetic eyelid surgery (operculum, 1993); and a meditation on the phenomenon of word ...

Kissing hats, elephants driving, a man who turns into the sun, and dinosaurs roaming the countryside rarely happen in real life, but at the stop-motion film screening Stop & Go all of this will become ordinary. Established filmmakers and visual artists using stop-motion, tell stories, examine visual phenomena, and make political statements in a collection of short videos. Curated by San Francisco Bay Area artist and animator, Sarah Klein, Klein (who uses hand-drawn images and stop-motion animation in her own work), chose pieces that explore the possibilities of stop-motion processes. The animators breathe life into magazine cutouts, homemade drawings, everyday ...

For the last six years, artist Takeshi Murata and musician Robert Beatty (Hair Police, Three Legged Race) have collaborated on a series of visceral glitch-based animations, setting Murata’s psychedelic imagery to Beatty’s hypnotic compositions. Murata's videos range from hand-drawn animations of fluidly morphing shapes to painterly abstractions of meticulously hijacked digital code. Beatty employs hacked electronics and thrift store cast-offs to craft otherworldly sonic narratives. Together, the duo’s electronic alchemy transforms the detritus of consumer culture into dazzling tapestries of sound and color. This evening, CATE teams up with experimental music and intermedia series Lampo to bring ...

Chasing Two Rabbits is a special event curated by Sonia Yoon and Shannon Stratton that pairs animators with live performances by sound artists and musicians. Inspired by the experimental films of Norman McLaren, who combined abstract imagery (including scratching and painting into the film stock in earlier work, as well as paper cut-outs and live action and dance) with imaginative music and sound, Chasing Two Rabbits, acts to pair artists in both genres to produce a unique event where, rather than leaving art to illustrate a story, perhaps sound and vision will illuminate each other. The program for the ...

New York-based photographer and writer Moyra Davey is known for her finely observed photographs of domestic interiors. Her graceful, straightforward images catalog life’s in-between moments and overlooked objects–still lifes of crowded bookshelves, empty whiskey bottles, and dust.  In recent years, Davey has turned to video, combining her eye for the everyday with a literary voice.  This evening, she will present two of these works. In Fifty Minutes (2006), Davey uses the standard length of a therapy session to examine her own history with psychoanalysis while also raising questions about autobiography, nostalgia, and the ways we all come to know and ...

Shopaholics, rethink and rejoice! Presented in the aisles of THE FREE STORE, Gallery 400's newest (non)commercial wing, here's a film/video treatise on the joys and terrors of cash and commerce, in two parts. Beginning in the mid-80s improvised music / language poetry / experimental dance scene (!) of the East Village and "featuring" John Zorn, Arto Lindsay, Abigail Child, Christian Marclay and over 2500 synch-sound cuts in fifteen minutes, Henry Hills' Money is a montage-barrage time capsule view of $ociety'$ greate$t ill$. With this new-found insight into the essence of bling, German media essayist Harun Farocki takes ...

Presented by Homeroom, hosted by Jon Satrom. The YouTube Assembly is an attempt to capture the phenomenon of viral video in a live event. The event consists of screening web-based video for a live, participating audience. Like karaoke or a traditional performance open mic, the YouTube Assembly creates a situation in which people take turns entertaining each other, in this case, by sharing their favorite Youtube clips. In the spirit of the popular YouTube interface, audience members will be encouraged to comment on the videos they watch, except out loud and in real time with no anonymity Each screening will ...

An evening of new film and video work from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Editing Aesthetics course taught by Michelle Peutz. Featuring brand-spanking-new films and videos from Theodore Darst, Nick Edelberg, Samuel Jacob Eisen, Carlos Enriquez, James Ferguson, Danny Gallegos, Emily Irvine, David Lee, Karina Natis, Matthew O'Shaughnessy, David Olson, Hae Yeon Park, Anthony Rizzo and Heather Shilling.

Hailed as "one of the most interesting artists to emerge in this century" by Roberta Smith of the New York Times, Los Angeles-based artist and SAIC alumnus Sterling Ruby is known for his aggressive biomorphic sculptures, defaced minimalist forms, and large spray-painted canvases. His videos are similarly charged, referencing pornography, abstract painting, and evoking states of transience, entropy, and transgression. In Hole (2002), workers in the back room of a chain store surreptitiously and suggestively stuff merchandise into a hole in a plaster wall. Transient Trilogy (2005-09) finds Ruby playing both a drifter, who fashions talismans from the detritus ...

Torsten Zenas Burns works with lots of different mediums and with lots of different people. Collabtronica is a sample of different projects created in tandem with artists, Anne McGuire, Darrin Martin, Christian K. Burns, and Halflifers. Traversing through the worlds of Choregraphy, Performance, Video, and New Media, he explores the realms of performed identity through fantasy characters and has an interest in re-envisioning educational spaces. Often creating animated counterparts of his collaborators, TZB creates spaces where kinesthetics meets virtual life. For example, WHAT IF?, made with longtime collaborator, Darrin Martin utilizes dance software that recreates ...

Thirty years before the ubiquitous YouTube mash-up, artist Dara Birnbaum hijacked television imagery in a series of coolly ironic videos that recontextualized pop cultural icons (Wonder Woman, Kojak, Laverne & Shirley), TV grammar (inserts, two-shots, wipes), and genres (soap operas, sitcoms, game shows) to reveal their ideological subtexts. Birnbaum described her videos as late 20th century "ready-mades"–works that "manipulate a medium which is itself highly manipulative." Now renowned as a pioneer in televisual appropriation, she is currently the subject of a major retrospective that began at S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Belgium, and will tour to Museu Fundação Serralves in Porto, ...