Odds and Ends is proud to present an evening of eclectic and electrifying films and videos from Stacey Steers, Grace Carter and Holly Andres, John Bacone, Alec Cohen, Jeremy Bird, Vanessa Renwick and more! This selection combines elements from Odds and Ends Volumes 1 and 2 plus a few new treats.
Date: Saturday the 17th at NoBrow Coffee and Tea in Salt Lake City Utah (315 E. 300 S.) and will begin at 8pm
THE LINE UP:
1. No One Touches the Floor (2006) video
John Bacone (PDX)
“’No One Touches the Floor’ by John Bacone uses a simple equation—Swimming + Flying + Time Control = AWESOME!”
Christine S. Blystone (PORTLAND MERCURY)
John Bacone is a sculptor and filmmaker living in Portland, OR. Currently working with two dance companies, Polaris Dance Theater and a-wol Dance Collective, as set/sound designer, and videographer; he also carves frames for the work painted by elephants and dolphins at the Indianapolis Zoo.
2. The Birthday, 8 min.
by Stephen Slappe
Synopsis:
The Birthday depicts the reproduction of human life through scientific experimentation. The video was created using appropriated animation, x-rays and microscopic photography culled from 16mm educational films. The Birthday usurps the intent of the source material with the help of a haunting score of electronic improvisations by Rob Walmart.
Filmmaker BIO:
Stephen Slappe is a multidisciplinary artist working in Portland, Oregon.
website
www.stephenslappe.com
3. Spheres 1 min
By Jeremy Bird
JEREMY BIRD is a videomaker and video editor in Portland, Oregon. His short videos are said to harmonize sound and picture into a series of engaging instants. He has edited music videos, feature films, commercials, and has created projections for live music and dance performance. His latest short, "Spheres", has screened at moving-image festivals around the world.
www.jeremybird.net
4. I got shot with a bullet, video 16 min.
by Alec Cohen
Years after being accidentally shot in downtown Manhattan, Alec Cohen has retreated to Portland, OR to escape the danger of his past. Now, equipped with $50 and some newfound courage, Alec and his near-silent, 12-year old best friend Raymond are on a quest to buy a gun. I Got Shot with a Bullet investigates Pop-Culture American Manhood and its relationship to violence. It's also funny.
Filmmaker Bio:
Alec is one of the founding members of Sandymontana, a Portland based director's collective. He is from Long Island, NY and is inspired by nonsense and important social issues.
Website
www.sandymontana.com
5. Neuro-Economy
Created by Jill Kennedy
Liner Notes:
“Neuro Economy” is a short animated film to a real audio recording found on a telephone answering machine.
Set in a composite domestic setting of both past and present a recorded message starts to play back on a telephone answering machine in the living room. An anonymous caller from 21 years ago describes himself. The caller goes on to explain a Neuro Economy and details his plans for a Quantum Computer Emulator. The message continues to diverge further and further from reality. Animated graphics sourced from learning material of the 1960’s and 70’s begin to appear, eventually taking over the living room as we glimpse a cross section of reality as perceived by the anonymous caller.
Bio:
Jill Kennedy was born 1981 in Glasgow, Scotland. In 1982 her family moved to Auckland, New Zealand. She has been living in Auckland where she has recently graduated from a Graduate Diploma in Design studying at Unitec Institute of Technology.
Prior to this, she completed a Bachelor of Design majoring in Fine Art Painting in 2002 at Unitec Institute of Technology. She has been involved in several group shows exhibiting work at Enjoy Gallery in Wellington, Snow White Gallery and Room 401 in Auckland.
After the completion of the course, Jill moved back to Glasgow. She spent time traveling Europe and returned to study animation in 2006. She completed a Graduate Diploma in Design and spent the last four months of her course completing her first animated short film “Neuro Economy”.
Recently, she has collaborated on work with the New Zealand Painter Mark Braunias. She completed an animation of Mark’s drawings which showed at the Jonathan Smart Gallery in August 2007. She is currently working on a new piece with Mark, which will be on show at the opening of the new Tauranga Art Gallery in October 2007.
6. Tidal Wave 1.5 min
by Salise Hughes
One man’s nightmares take physical taking the form of each and every figure in the crowd.
BIO
Born January 11th 1955 in Tacoma Washington. Studied visual art at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle and the San Francisco Art Institute. Artworks included in Microsoft and Seattle Arts Commission collections. Visiting drawing instructor at Cornish College of the Arts from 1991-93. Began making films as a self-taught filmmaker in 2005. Lives in Seattle.
7. God Provides, video 9 min
by Brian Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky
Synopsis:
Shot in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and bound by elements of fiction, this unexpected documentary short is a glimpse into faith-based sentiment and inexplicable loss in the American South. While a man searches for his kitchen appliances in the bushes, elsewhere a grinning preacher takes souvenir snapshots for his congregation, and a woman with a disability journeys to a quieter place.
Filmmaker Bios:
Brian M. Cassidy (b. 1977, Poughkeepsie, USA) and Melanie Shatzky (b. 1976, Montreal, Canada) met in 2004 in New York City and shortly thereafter began collaborating on both narrative and documentary films. The duo have shown their work at the Sundance Film Festival, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Silverdocs, South by Southwest (SXSW), the Kunsthalle Wien, and the European Media Art Festival (EMAF). Their short fiction, The Delaware Project, was nominated for a Tiger Award at Rotterdam, and won the 2007 EMAF Award at the European Media Art Festival. They were recently profiled in Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film.
Cassidy and Shatzky’s work often forgoes conventional storytelling methods in order to accommodate stark imagery, elusive characters, a deadpan realism, and has been described by Glenn Kenny of Premiere Magazine as “cogent and sickly surreal”. In 2005, they founded their production company, Pigeon Projects, which continues to develop and evolve as an outlet for their personal work as well as a commercial studio. Both Cassidy and Shatzky hold MFAs in Photography, Video & Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
website
www.pigeonprojects.com
8. Michael Paulus (PDX)
The Journal of John Magillicutty 2006 dv [2:20]
“Strenuous but an intermission...”
Michael Paulus is an artist living in Portland Oregon. The marriage of science and art play prominently in his work, often times creating objects that are inherently misguided or dysfunctional in design. A parody of types on the sometimes absolute efficiency and logic that we come to expect from tools and technology.
The figures in his moving image work are usually ‘specimens’ to be observed and usually find themselves in absurd situations they are ill adept to comprehend.
In his static work often times there is an interchange between object and viewer. Sometimes testing the perceptions of the viewer and often times using an established medium or tool/design and tweaking it a bit to put it in a critical context
website
www.michaelpaulus.com
9. The Places left in passing 2.5
by Kiri Hargie
an animated movie about the inbetween spaces, both physical and mental,
that are left behind after the passing of a loved one.
In Memory of Martha Hargie
Filmmak
er Bio:Live, love, learn, create, leave ripples, go man go! Whether automatic writing, sculpting, animating, photographing, drawing, or moshing media interactively mixed media artist Kiri Hargie collages the minutiae of the extraordinary ordinary. A consummate world lover, she one day wishes to drive around the world in an ice cream truck collecting stories and art.
www.hargie.com
10. Nora
by Grace Carter and Holly Andres
Synopsis:
An afternoon encounter between two lovers plays out in an unusual fashion as issues of power, domination and gender reversal are explored.
Holly Andres approaches her art in a multidisciplinary manner, and works in film, photography, sculpture and installation. In collaboration with performer/filmmaker Grace Carter, Andres created the short films DANDELION, BRAVE NEW GIRL and their newest narrative, NORA. Their work has been featured in the NW Film + Video Festival, Best of the Northwest Touring Program, the Portland International Film Festival, the Portland Experimental Film Festival, the Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum and the Perpetual Art Machine in New York. Andres teaches video production and foundation art classes at PSU and the Art Institute of Portland.
website
www.hollyandres.com
Grace Carter has been working in theatre arts and filmmaking for the past six years in Portland, OR. She Co-founded the critically acclaimed defunct theatre and collaborated as a producer, director and actor on several stage performances. Grace’s films have been screened at several regional festivals including the 32nd annual Northwest Film and Video Festival, The PDX Fest and the Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum. Grace has also worked as an actor on many film projects the most recent “Paranoid Park,” a new feature by Gus Van Sant.
website
www.gracecarterfilms.com
11. Phantom Canyon 10 min.
by Stacey Steers
Stacey Steers lives in Boulder, Colorado where she teaches for the Film Studies Program at the University of Colorado. Her labor-intensive films are composed of thousands of individual, handmade works on paper. Her animations have screened worldwide and won national and international awards. She has been awarded residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Harvard University and Sacatar Foundation.
Synopsis for Phantom Canyon:
A curious woman meets an alluring man with bat wings in this personal recollection of a pivotal journey. This animated film was created from over 4000 hand-made collages incorporating the figures from Eadweard Muybridge’s Human and Animal Locomotion, first published in 1887.
or
Meticulous handmade collages explore a woman’s fantastical journey through memories.
Production Notes for Phantom Canyon:
Phantom Canyon is composed of over 4000 6X8” collages. These were constructed from Xeroxed elements of 18th and 19th century engravings (primarily Dover clip art) combined with the figures from Eadweard Muybridge’s Human and Animal Locomotion, first published in 1887. The Muybridge figures were themselves collaged to create the movements necessary for the narrative flow of the film. The bodies of some with the heads of others, the arms of one on the torso of another etc. The collages were then shot on an old Oxberry animation stand onto 35mm film stock. There were texture layers added using transparencies.
website
www.staceysteers.com
12. 9 is a secret
By Vanessa Renwick, video 6 minutes 2002
score by Donovan Skirvin
"Renwick recounts a sad time in her life, when a friend was dying and she suddenly became aware of the presence of crows. The dark birds in turn point her to the practice of counting crows, which is both a children's rhyming game and a form of divination in which the number of crows suggests events in the future. Eight crows auger death: nine crows reference a secret. Renwick combines these fragments with glimpses of imagery- a bed, the crows captures as silhouettes, a man's twisted body - to craft a lyrical and moving essay that works its magic through poetic accretion rather than narrative logic."
-Holly Willis, L.A. Weekly
Vanessa Renwick
Founder and janitor of the Oregon Department of Kick Ass
A filmmaker by nature, not by stress of research. She puts scholars to rout by solving through Nature's teaching problems that have fretted their trained minds. Her iconoclastic work reflects an interest in place, relationships between bodies and landscapes, and all sorts of borders. Working in experimental and poetic documentary forms, she produces films, videos and installations that explore the possibility of hope in contemporary society. She is a naturalist, born, not made : a true barefoot, cinematic rabblerouser, of grand physique, calm pulse and a magnetism that demands the most profound attention.
Represented by PDX Contemporary Art
www.pdxcontemporaryart.com
Filmmaker website
www.odoka.org
13. Blue Tapes 7 min
By Jeremy Bird
14. in perpetuity Circle of Purity 2.5 min
by Liz Haley
In Perpetuity, Circle of Purity (2006) is a video conceived during a 10 day silent meditation retreat.
Artist Bio:
Liz Haley, born in 1972 the youngest of six children, was raised with community and escape as equally strong and polar influences. Haley has used video, photography, audio, installation and performance to explore concepts including the weather, physics, love, progress and other vulnerabilities of humanity. Her work has been exhibited in New York, San Francisco and Miami at the Museum of Contemporary Art. As part of her work, she is an independent curator and in 2005, co-founded a performance, cafe and exhibition space called Valentines in Portland, OR. She has an upcoming book on YETI publishing.
website
www.lizhaley.com
