LIGHT SHOW

Stateless Cinema program at the Contemporary Museum
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Doors at 6:30 pm, screening begins at 7 pm
100 W. Center Street, Baltimore, MD
$3 students / $5 general admission

Taking the Contemporary’s current exhibition Double Take: The Poetics of Illusion and Light as a point of inspiration, Stateless Cinema has organized this program of short experimental films and videos by artists who investigate the lightness and darkness around them.

Generously sponsored by Creative Alliance movie makers (CAmm) Cage and Media Lab

Program:

New York Near Sleep for Saskia (10 min., 16mm, 1972) by Peter Hutton
"Using exciting juxtapositions of shade and movement, this silent and surreally poetic film examines subtle changes of light and landscape in New York. New York Near Sleep for Saskia exploits the basic potential of film for capturing light refractions. Hutton imposes on this film the aesthetics of still photography and uses as a structural device the duration of perception of the subtle reflection of movements and illuminations." - Bill Moritz, Theatre Vanguard

Private Movie (6 min., video, 2000) by Naomi Uman
Through studies on light, movement, happiness, glowing darkness and flickering melancholia, this video tells of a woman's journey of love with nostalgia, pets, places, and men.

Tuareg (6.43 min., video 2008) by Bruce Checefsky
A melodious assemblage of Alencon lace, Venetian lace and Point D'espirit lace; artificial silk flowers, plants and trees seen as shadows cast by tube, pocket, and LED flashlights. Photographed in black-and-white on outdated direct positive film from 1985, the resulting dense grain images evoke a veil of secrecy and tension surrounding the film's meaning.

Observando El Cielo (19 min., 16mm, 2007) by Jeanne Liotta
"Seven years of celestial field recordings gathered from the chaos of the cosmos and inscribed onto 16mm film from various locations upon this turning tripod Earth. This work is neither a metaphor nor a symbol, but is feeling towards a fact in the midst of perception, which time flows through. Natural VLF radio recordings of the magnetosphere in action allow the universe to speak for itself. The Sublime is Now. Amor Fati!" — J.L.

[B]LACK (11 min., video, 2006) by Kenyatta Forbes
Through this potent and provocative performance, viewers' assumptions about the subject are challenged and brought critically and intelligently into question, using humor to draw us in and then confronting us, as the subject literally purges ideas of Blackness which we've digested for decades.

Alice Sees the Light (6 min., 2006) by Ariana Gerstein
Alice laments the loss of her view of the universe, one of her intial reasons for living in the country. The change in her environment is the result of "security lighting" for a large corporate storage facility.