SPRING/SUMMER 2003 EXHIBITIONS
APRIL

Thursday, April 24, 8pm at Squeaky Wheel
At Home and Asea
(Mark Street, 70 min, 2002)
Using documentary and fictional elements, At Home and Asea unfolds in a series of unsettling and poignant vignettes centered on five characters who piece together lives in Baltimore, Maryland. An African-American man sifts through his father’s suburban home looking for keys to a seemingly opaque life. A recent college grad drinks beer on rooftops and wanders the blighted cityscape as he considers a move to California. Three single mothers struggle to keep their dreams alive in the face of oppressive extended family dynamics. In a blend of direct address, interviews and dramatic scenes, At Home and Asea meditates on displacement and isolation in the modern landscape.

"In At Home and Asea, Five Baltimore residents grapple --no self pity allowed--with their feelings of being stuck in lives that are less than meaningful. Street's amalgam of documentary and fiction is poignant and, thanks to Guy Yarden's score, anxiety-provoking. It's also a subtly crafted portrait of an economically blighted city, pulled between North and South and central to neither." (Amy Taubin, Village Voice, May 2002)

Mark Street holds degrees from Bard College and the San Francisco Art Institute. He films have shown internationally at many venues and festivals including the Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, Film Millennium, the San Francisco Cinematheque, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival. He is Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Maryland.

ALSO:

Friday April 25 8pm
Films by Mark Street
At Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center
2495 Main St. # 425
$4 Hallwalls/Squeaky Wheel members/ $ 5 general

PREMIERE!
Fulton Fish Market
(15 min., color, sound, 16mm, 2003 sound by Guy Yarden)
The Fulton Fish Market explodes with movement, sound and color in the very early hours, Monday through Friday…Street has painted the film using color dyes and acrylic paints, bleached and scratched out sections of the emulsion. (www.tonicnyc.com)

Echo Anthem
(8 min, color, sound, 16mm, 1991)
Hand painted and tinted footage to suggest a skewed, tattered version of N. American nationalism. The film invites the viewer to be at once soothed and repulsed by the seething display of the flag.

Blue Movie
(5 min, color, sound, 16mm, 1994)
A smattering of repeated performances culled from old porno films and hand painted. On the soundtrack Anais Nin declares: "but while I'm doing this I feel I'm not living."

Winterwheat
(eight min, color, sound, 16mm, 1989)
Made by bleaching, scratching and painting directly on the emulsion of an educational film about the farming cycle. The manipulations of the film's surface created hypnotic visuals while also suggesting an apocalyptic narrative.

Excursions
(26 min, color, sound, 16mm, 1994)
A cast of characters sift through their experiences as travelers in Mexico and Guatemala. "Real" journal entries mix with faux diaries, sound recorded by travelers on location, and excerpts from a novel to explore the boundary between travel and imperialism.

TRILOGY
• Sweep
  (7 min, color, sound, 16mm, 1998)
• The Domestic Universe
  (17 min., color, sound, video, 2000)
• Sliding Off The Edge Of The World
  (7 min, silent, color, 35mm/16mm, 2000)

Happy?
(20 min, color, sound, video, 2000)
An exploration of how the passage of time affects people.

Guiding Fictions
(five min., color, sound, 16mm, 2002)
The schism between the country and the city, so clear at last


MAY

FRIDAY, MAY 9     8pm
In person: Rebecca Cleman and John Thomson
of NYC’s Electronic Arts Intermix present:
Video Anti-Heroes: Drop Ceilings, Acid Colored Anything

Squeaky Wheel and NYC’s video distributor EAI join forces to present an evening of classic video art from some 20 years ago, often neglected but amazing video from EAI’s archive.

“Beyond the superficial connections of these videos - all made by men, all dating from the late 70s to early 80s - there is a provocative commonality in their expressionist use of video to portray an anti-hero (often the artist himself), suffering the cultural milieu of drop ceilings, acid-colored anything, and high-gloss advertising. These at times intimate, at other times cold and constructed portraits blur the delineations between loser and narcissist, vulnerable loner and psychopath.” (R. Cleman)


Ante Bozanich, Selected Works, 1974-80, 31.05 min, b&w and color. Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.

The Loner (Tony Oursler, 1980, 29:56 min, color, sound)
Charmant Band (Klaus vom Bruch, 1983, 9:19 min, sound)
Room Service (Tony Labat, 1980, 7:37 min, color, sound)
I am the Light (Ante Bozanich 1976, 3:57 min, b&w, sound)
Scratch (Ante Bozanich 1980, 10:25 min, color, sound)
Secret Horror (Mike Smith 1980, 13:38 min, color, sound)


FRIDAY, MAY 30       8pm
Psychosex, Regarding Mommy and Dad
Curated by NYC filmmaker Matt Wolf, in person

Filmmakers show psychological representations of sexuality in alternative documentary forms. Taboo and unironic, abstract and improvisational, these experimental works articulate unacceptable queer and feminist dialogues about sexuality and paternity. (M. Wolf)

A Big Thing Like You (Danielle Lombardi, 16mm, 2002, eight min)
Lombardi imagines tender and violent exchanges between father, mother, and child in lurid optically printed abstraction.

Sweet Boy (Karen Everett, video, 2001, 30 min)
Reveals an imaginative lesbian world where erotic fantasies bring sexual healing. This radically confessional documentary represents unspoken psychological-sexual preoccupations.

Golden Gums (Matt Wolf, video, 2002, 13 min)
Probes the inner-workings of an indulged post-adolescent psyche.

Martina's Playhouse (Peggy Ahwesh, Super 8–video, 1989, 20 min)
A self-aware home movie made with the complicity of subjects from a female-privileged perspective.


MATT WOLF
Matt Wolf is a 21-year-old filmmaker and video artist in Brooklyn, New York. His films and videos have screened in venues including the MIX Experimental Film Festival, New York Underground Film Festival, Frameline, Art In General, Sundance Channel, and Walker Art Center. Golden Gums was awarded First Prize at the 2003 Black Maria Film and Video Festival. Matt curates experimental film and video programs, most recently for the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema and the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. Additionally, his writing has been published in media arts journals and magazines, including the Independent and FELIX: Journal for Media Arts and Communication. Matt has advocated alternative media production with Paper Tiger Television and he attends New York University's Institute of Film and Television, where he was awarded the W.T.C Johnson Fellowship.

FILMOGRAPHY
Conversion/TRANSgression (in production 2002-2003) (in collaboration with Tara Mateik) Transgender re-enactment of Vitto Acconci's gendered performance tapes.
Magic Box (in production 2002-2003) What is the opposite of protest footage?
Golden Gums (2002) 13:30, color, video A diagnostic exposition of the Narcissistic Personality Disorder foregrounds a personal story about love, loss and gold spray-painted plaster models of teeth. A project about public confession and private performance.
This Flight (2001) 1:00, color, 16mm-to-video A boy departs.
Dear Auntie (2001) Looping, b/w, 16mm-to-video
Beautiful Bones (1999) 5:00, color, video
House Boy, 2002, USA, Super8mm, B&W, silent, 3 min.
An ambiguously asexual treatment of the erotics of sublimated gay television representation. A basic, all-revealing clue: "Mr. Belvedere."
Writing:
The Independent. "Jennifer Dworkin: Philosopher Turned Documentary Filmmaker." May
The Independent. "Astria Suparak: Experimental Curator as Rock Star." April
MAIN: National Alliance of Media Arts and Culture. "Keyword Youth." Fall
The Independent. "Interview with James Fotopoulous." October
Squealer. "Grilling the Underground." Fall
Felix: A Journal of Media Arts and Communication. "Queer Youth Objects." Risk/Riego

There seems to be a trend toward very young, hip, urban curators on the time-arts scene.
-How did you get into curating?
Yes, there is definitely a strong presence of young curators in the contemporary art and film/video fields. Many of us came of age and learned skills from other types of political/art movements-- we were high school students during many DIY, grassroots cultural things. My friend, curator Astria Suparak grew up in Los Angeles during Riot Grrl and learned many of her organizing/aesthetic priorities as a young person on the outskirts of this feminist phenomena. I was growing up in San Francisco as a gay teen activist. I co-founded a non-profit organization with other young people
and was active in legislative reform movements. So at the tail end of identity politics and fashions in "youth development" I accessed many adult opportunities, including a streak of idealistic "entrepreneurial" skills. Many different people in non-profit groups and institutions made priorities
for young people to have direct experience and access to "professional" opportunities-- this was an important trend in the late nineties in non-profit organizations. So for example when I was 18 years old, a youth-led curatorial committee included a video I made as a sixteen-year-old in a screening at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis. It is a fairly recent thing for institutions to prioritize and make those kind of opportunities for pre-emerging artists and curators possible. I
definitely benefited from that kind of youth empowerment fashion.
When I moved to New York at the age of 18, I became active in Paper Tiger Television, a historic video activist collective. I was hired as a programmer to co-curate a five-hour collection of youth-produced video. This is how I became involved in the "youth media" video advocacy world, but
also where I gained the vocabulary and critical skills to "curate" alternative film and video.
So most of my experience comes directly from a personal history as an activist. Living in New York, I became very interested in the queer experimental film and video scene because this was the nature of my own filmmaking. I started showing my own work in these venues, and I also
started going to screenings in the broader art/experimental film world. I developed interests outside of queer work and developed vocabulary and a set of references that have informed other curatorial and writing projects.

You are also a writer, filmmaker, performance artist, and youth-arts advocate:
Do you consider any one of these things as a major career pursuit?
Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
I am a filmmaker, curator and writer. I write for magazines and journals about film/video and art. I published my first article when I was 19 years old about film/video works made by queer young people. BTW (I'm not a performance artist). In general, as a young person, I was trying to get
access-- I wanted to participate in the cultural community and I realized that simply producing content for magazines, film festivals, or microcinemas was much appreciated. For me, learning always needs to have public stakes and I have luckily been given the opportunity to make mistakes-- show works that are undeveloped, write mediocre articles, and curate thin programs--
for real audiences. As I get older, now 21, I have already grown from real life experiences and experiments and I incorporate this perspective in all of my projects.
So the trend of young curators is complex: there is a broader priority to give young people access, equipping us with experience and know how at very young ages. But at the same time, most cultural fields have always been obsessed with the "next," and institutions are finding expressions and artworks from the next generation at younger and younger ages.
In terms of professional futures-- my priority is to continue making my own work. I am writing and curating projects now because it is very difficult and challenging for me-- again, the issue of public stakes. Curating is becoming more of a vehicle for me to contextualize my own work and to
research bodies of work. For instance, I was interested in applying for a research opportunity in Helsinki, Finland, so I curated a program of contemporary Finnish experimental video at the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema in New York. I curated Psychosex specifically to contextualize my film
within the critical framework of the psychoanalytic, rather than the theme of youth. My work ordinarily shows in exclusively gay/lesbian or youth contexts. The most awarding screenings have been outside of this context. So, in ten years I see myself taking creative risks with public stakes by showing my own art and participating in the broader art world with writing and curatorial projects. And against my better wishes, I suspect I will end up in academia.
-What are your goals as a youth-arts advocate?
As a youth media advocate, I have done writing and curatorial projects to contextualize youth productions as a specific field with formal and historical connections to the trajectory of American experimental and activist film and video. Youth media is an important development in the
history of alternative video production, but the work is often categorized (by its advocates) as "media made by young people FOR young people." In fact the work is really interesting to multi-generational audiences. And young artists often adopt experimental forms instinctively to express their ideas, instead of citing an art school education or a privileged set of references. I have been in the position a few times to articulate this context or to somehow speak for the youth media field at large. Most recently I co-curated a program of queer youth produced video for the London
Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.

There seem to be a multiplicity of themes in “Psychosex,” ranging from Freud to Lacan, “The Gaze” to voyeurism, and “The Document” versus photographic truth. You seem to be challenging the notion of authorship itself.
-What were your conceptual aims in curating “Psychosex?”
-How did you choose the work?
-What is your background in philosophy/psychology, and does this interest stem from personal experience?
I developed Psychosex without a clear thematic or historical position. Instead, I wanted to position work within the context of a critical strategy. Most evident in these works is the strategy of
self-psychoanalysis-- especially in my tape and in Karen Everett's piece Sweet Boy. But I also looked for experimental projects that constructed psychological scenes, where the behavior and performance of documentary subjects were under critical or psychoanalytic evaluation. In McGuirl's
video, she effectively turns the internet chat consul into a psychological theater with complex sexual spectacle. Peggy Ahwesh does the same thing with her staged/improvised home Super-8 performance collaborations with the young girl named Martina in Martina's Playhouse.
A second strategy under examination is the appropriation of "vernacular technologies" or home film and video documents, such as the home video in my film Golden Gums, the webcam in McGuirl's video, or the family super 8 source material in Danielle's film. These family documents have been
incorporated into conceptual film/video projects, which traverse the nuances of sexuality. On a thematic level, the projects (some explicitly and others more subtly) exhibit complicated psychological relationships between the makers' sexual identification and his or her parents. Like all psychoanalytic theory, the paternal/infantile relationship is the object of inquiry.
Yes, I do have an academic background with psychoanalysis-- a complicated relationship in fact with the critical strategy. I wanted to address psychoanalysis as a fashion in this program. Particularly feminist critics have historically used psychoanalysis as a weapon for critique. Most
famously, Laura Mulvey's essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema broke down the "gaze" with thick psychoanalytic analysis of the cinematic apparatus. Psychoanalysis in art and academia floats in and out of style. Same with the formal style in these film/video works. Karen Everett's film
Sweet Boy uses an "inner-child, eco-feminist" tone to conduct a Jungian psychoanalysis of the mommmy-boy role-play in dyke relationships. By all means, this style and perspective is out of fashion and I wonder how audiences will respond to its matter-of fact new age outlook. My work uses psychoanalysis with much more ironic, self-deprecating humor. Its symptomatic exposition of the Narcissistic Personality Disorder pokes fun at the self-indulgence in autobiographical art.

You have a piece in “Psychosex.”
-How do you feel about self-curating?
-You are also the only male artist in the program. Was this accidental, or was there a conceptual reason for it?
-You also seem to be the youngest artist in the program. Again, was this accidental, or was there a conceptual reason for it [beyond your interest in promoting younger artists]?
This program actually came about because some staff members at Squeaky Wheel approached me about showing my own work at the media arts center. I didn't feel that I had enough work to show alone, so I decided to curate a program to contextualize this particular piece, Golden Gums. Last year I was on the programming committee for the MIX Experimental Lesbian and Gay Film
Festival. When the committee decided not to program Sweet Boy, I was committed to showing the work to a public audience. Something about its lack of irony and its extreme modes of self-revelation seemed radically unacceptable right now. So I wanted to build a context to connect it to my own work.
I have actually never curated my own work before. This program is a collection of many of my interests, not just a padded context for my own project. There are no particular reasons why I am the only male in this program. I definitely was thinking from a feminist film theory/history when
conceptualizing the program, which likely informed my selection of all female artists. I am the youngest artist in this program, but the works have no immediate relationship to youth media.

How much of a self-portrait is “Golden Gums,” or is your role functioning merely as a symbolic vehicle to facilitate psychological discussion?
Golden Gums is a documentary self-portrait-- I did give a gold model of my jaw to a boyfriend, who did subsequently break up with me. The narration and its enactments are fictionalized, but the project is by all means confessional and true. In my work I actively facilitate critical distance from the personal with formal strategies. Psychoanalysis in Golden Gums is a strategy to mock my own experience as a narcissist. The tape is at moments incredibly sincere and moments later bitterly ironic. During its most explicit sincerity, I have trouble watching the project myself!

Danielle Lombardi’s “A Big Thing Like You” seems to me to be merely presenting a situation, and not actually making a statement. What is your take on this piece?
Lombardi's project is the most formally rigorous of the work in Psychosex. I don't see the project as abstract, rather conceptual, because of Lombardi's choice to appropriate family super 8 films. Lombardi is mixing and collaging different scenes, which become the sites of psychic-conceptual
articulations. By all means her approach is more expressive than critical or textual.

JUNE

Friday June 27, 8pm
Don't Panic - It's Organic!
films and videos by Jason Livingston, in person



Auto Focus (1997)
Every memory of an Ithaca early childhood condensed into a three
minute video, delivered via wind-up chattering teeth.

Every Angel is Terrible (1994)
This documentary essay, set in the early 90s heyday of the Culture Wars, begins as a journalistic investigation into Political
Correctness and then moves into a genre-shifting exploration.

The Eight Dollar Brick (1996)
The early 90s essay form redux.

Not a Drop (1998)
An examination of a park, and walking through a park, and how walking through a park involves looking at other people and also looking inward.

The Two Boys (1999)
Recombining a sailor's footage of 60s Hong Kong with stolen silent film era intertitles with Smurfsong with a secret cut and a fulcrum with a sea chantey about death.

Don't Panic - It's Organic! (1999-2002)
An ever-changing multimedia multiple screen meditation.
Jason Livingston is a media maker living in Ithaca, NY. He worked with Iowa City’s Thaw Festival and is now working with Cornell Cinema.

August

On THURSDAY, AUGUST 21, 8PM
$ 4 members / $ 5 general

LIMINAL LUMEN: FILM AND FILM PERFORMANCE by Luis Recoder.
The Program will include: The Optic Curve (2003), Linea (2002), Available Light: Shift (2001), Still Succession (2001), Backlight (2001), Available Light: Blue-Violet and Green (2000-02). Luis Recoder's obsessively hermetic meta-cinema has propelled him into a kind of semi-stardom of his own.
In he last three years, Recorder's films and film performances have appeared in the New York Film Festival, the Viennale, the Rotterdam Film Festival and the 2002 Whitney Biennial. Review about Liminal Lumen: Fred Camper, Chicago Reader http://65.201.198.41/movies/critic.html

THE MATTER WITH FILM - a film screening curated by

Sandra Gibson
FRIDAY, AUGUST 22, 8PM,
$5 non-members, $4 members

THE MATTER WITH FILM on FRIDAY, AUGUST 22, 8PM, at SQUEAKY WHEEL.
The Matter With Film is a play on the condition of film-as-matter and its matter-of-factness in the face of emerging technologies. What's the matter with film anyway? Why does it matter? As a matter-of-fact film matters. How? It matters as soon as the maker takes the material at hand. In this meeting between film-as-matter and hand something is grasped. Grasped into matter. In the grasping of matter the latter grasps the hand in return, slaps back so to speak. Back-and-forth. The objectification of film as matter and the matter of objectifying go hand in hand, catch one another. The Matter With Film is a catchy title for a curious game we play with a bit of matter. Once handed, we can matter-the-matter so that it matters. For all the films in this program matter in the face of what does not matter, that is of that which immatters and relentlessly chatters.

Works include: Fear of Blushing by Jennifer Reeves, Skate by Cade Bursell, Flight by Guy Sherwin, eros.ion by Bradley Eros, Baptismo by Casey Kohler, Cruises by Cecile Fontaine, Light Magic by Isabella Prushka-Oldenhof, Oona's Veil by Brian Frye, Soundings by Sandra Gibson, Maria Movie by Jeanne Liotta, Hand Eye Coordination by Naomi Uman, and a surprise film by Bruce McClure.

This screening is part of Squeaky Wheel’s NEA International Digital Filmmaker’s Residency Program; Sandara Gibson is the 2003 resident. Each year, residents curate a screening, teach a workshop, create new work, learns non-linear digital editing, and screens work.

DIRECT FILM WORKSHOP - a hands-on film workshop with Sandra Gibson
SUNDAY, AUGUST 24, 1-5PM, SQUEAKY WHEEL, 175 ELMWOOD AVE
$20 members, $25 non-members.

DIRECT FILM WORKSHOP, SUNDAY, AUGUST 24, 1-5PM, at SQUEAKY WHEEL. $20 members, $25 non-members.
On Sunday, August 24, Sandra will teach a DIRECT FILM WORKSHOP, a companion piece to Friday's screening, THE MATTER WITH FILM. The class will be an opportunity to discuss and pursue some of the hand-made techniques developed in those films as well as additional screening of films not in the program (films by Devon Damonte, Stephanie Maxwell, Steven Woloshen, Donna Cameron, Luis Recoder, and other surprises!) If you want to find out more abut direct film this is your opportunity to learn the basic skills, methods, processes involved. Materials will be available for attendees to use if desired. Attendees are welcome to bring their own material - or even films to share (if you make direct films and want to share your own insights).

Winter/Spring 2003 open screenings:

Jan 8: “Hot Cocoa Open Screening”
Feb 12: Special Call for Work Show: Third Annual Luv n Sex Show! Early deadline: Mon. Feb 10 See above description.
March 12: “Lucky Open Screening”
April 9: “Spring Fling Open Screening”
May 14th: “Outta School Open Screening”
June 11: “Is it summer yet? Open screening”

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