The Soft Epic or; Savages of the Pacific West

July 26, 2008 6:00 pm to August 23, 2008

Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib present a monumental video and audio installation examining historical and contemporary representations of cultural anxiety, and the fluid relationship between History and Cinema–where fact and fiction collapse into each other like the folds of a drawn theater curtain.

Comprised of multiple projections and a newly commissioned surround soundtrack by Bird Show, the work synthesizes images and effects from historical panoramas, epic sci-fi and disaster films, and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch in a fractured, dystopic cityscape dotted with eternal flames and chimeras. Across the expansive video projection, Hollywood splendor usurps mythological and historical narrative in service of political authority and social order. [ Soft Epic website ]

Sound by Ben Vida
Surround sound mix by Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib

Artist Biographies

Nadia Hironaka received her Masters of Fine Art from The Art Institute of Chicago and her Bachelors of Fine Art from The University of the Arts. Currently she resides in Philadelphia and is a professor at The Maryland Institute College of Art. Active within the community she is a supporter of local art venues and in 2007 co-founded Philadelphia’s only video gallery, Screening. She is a 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellow and received a Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 2006, other awards include: The Leeway Foundation, Peter Stuyvessant Fish Award in Media Arts, prog:me video artist award, The Black Maria Film Festival, and The New York Short Exposition Film Festival. Her films and video installations have been exhibited internationally in: PULSAR (Venezuela), Rencontres Internationals (Paris/Berlin), The Den Haag Film and Video Festival (The Netherlands), The Center for Contemporary Arts (Kitakyushu, Japan), The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Morris Gallery, The Black Maria Film Festival, The Donnell Library (NYC), The Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia), The Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), The Galleries at Moore College of Art (Philadelphia), and Vox Populi, (Philadelphia).

Philadelphia-based artist Matthew Suib has exhibited installations, video and audio works and photographs internationally at venues including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Kunstwerke Berlin, Mercer Union (Toronto), The Corcoran Gallery of Art (D.C.) and PS1 Contemporary Art Center (NYC). Recent exhibitions include Locally Localized Gravity at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), and the 2007 Moscow Biennale. In 2007, Suib co-founded Screening, along with artist Nadia Hironaka. Screening is Philadelphia’s first gallery dedicated to the presentation of innovative and challenging works on video and film. Screening is a project devoted to expanding access to these media and exploring ways that moving image culture influences our understanding and experience of the world. Suib is also a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellow, and a former member of the Philadelphia artist collective Vox Populi.

This exhibition and the following events have been organized by Helen Cahng. Supported in part by The Maryland Institute College of Art, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Department of Waste Management.

PEOPLE WATCHING

Friday August 1, 8pm
$5 suggested donation

This event is part of a series offered by The Public School (http://www.publicschool.org).
People Watching is a monthly film-screening series with the goal of approaching movies for their anthropological significance, over their contribution to film history or academia. The title of each film will be kept a mystery until the night of the screening.

Although World War II is most highly represented within the war film genre, the Vietnam War is arguably the most prominently featured in films of the past 30 years. Unlike their propagandistic counterparts of WWII, Vietnam War flicks tend to represent the disillusion of the American people towards the war and what it represented. Films such as Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket shocked audiences with their graphic and horrific depictions from the battlefield.

Our next screening will address the effects of war in a different light, with a film commonly categorized as a romantic comedy. This evening’s selection from 1968 is set in middle class Los Angeles where the war in Vietnam and the latent cultural anxiety it produced at home are seen not as the subject, but part of the backdrop for another story….

EVERYONE’S A CURATOR
Saturday, August 16, 7pm

This evening will feature a screening of YouTube videos curated by its audience. All are invited to select their favorite YouTube clip and submit the corresponding URL address to reserve a timeslot. Entries can be reserved ahead of time via Telic’s website or in person on the night of the event. There is no limit to the number of selections any one person can make and are strictly on a first come, first served basis to the first 50 entries. (Due to the large number of videos, please try and keep your selections around 3 minutes or less!)

$5 will reserve your timeslot and automatically enters you into a raffle of prizes donated by local businesses. The winners will be announced at the end of the evening.

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Erik Wesselo

April 26, 2008 at 6:00 pm

Erik Wesselo (1964 ’s-Hertogenbosch Netherlands) makes films that are marked by a clear beginning and end, but in between everything stays the same. Wesselo uses film, the medium of the moving image to bring time to a standstill. For the duration of the film he tries to capture the viewer with this one image. He uses the camera as a parallel to his psychological experience. The tragic moments in the films coalesce with their liberating potential.

The following is the program for Wesselo’s presentation:

Introduction.

Backward (1997 16 mm 5.00 min color sound) is an extremely physical film where the artist is riding on a galloping horse back to front exploring his relation with the environment.

In Luxembourg (1997 16 mm 3.35 min color sound) we see the smartly dressed artist as the bored caretaker of an empty, wealthy home where he walks from room to room. When he leans on the balcony a reverse zoom reveals the outside of the house, then the fact that it is surrounded by a gang of bikers. In a reference to Easy rider and it’s ideal, the freedom of the open road, the bikers come a cross here as a mental projection.

Wesselo’s Düffels Möll (1997 16 mm 5.00 min color mute) begins in medias res Wesselo is bound to the sail of a windmill rotating swiftly counterclockwise. By binding himself to the blade of the windmill, the artist is simultaneously empowered and powerless. Flying through the air at great heights he experiences the rush of being able to survey his surroundings from a new perspective.

Break.

Oil (2000 16 mm 30.00 min) records a performance event in which the artist and a co-worker are engaged in a monotonous and backbreaking task of loading a shipping container with boxes of oil. The film begins with an empty container and ends when the containers is full and the “actors” no longer have a performance space.

Break.

In Battery Park City (2006 two channel video projection 7.00 min color sound) Wesselo himself does not appear unlike the other films where he uses performances to explore structurally his relationship with the environment. In Battery Park City we see the camera exploring and investigating the landscape of lower Manhattan after the event of 9/11.

End.

This exhibition is made possible in part with support from the Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam, the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and basjanader.com.

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Wii Golf Range

June 23, 2007 at 12:00 pm to 6:00 pm

A round of Wii golf will cost $5 from noon to 6pm. The person with the lowest score wins 50% of the total collected from all players. In the event of a tie, players have the option of splitting the winnings or engaging in a winner-take-all playoff at 7pm.

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Airbrushing history

“Airbrushing history” is an interesting concept, particularly when applied to satellite imaging. I know it’s foolish to suggest that satellite photography makes claims toward authenticity and thruthfulness that regular old SLR photography can’t, but how often do we think about the man behind the satellite camera? Usually only when areas of the map are “blacked out,” censored by some political agenda.

How long will it be before there are hundreds of commercial competitors to Google Maps, all with their own ideologies and manipulations of history. A map that returns Europe to a glacier. One that shows every point on Earth during its most violent. Maybe a low budget map made of images stitched together from photos taken during cloudy weather, nothing but shades of grey.

Of course the giant, high resolution satellite map is a fiction. It’s never really even existed - it’s stored in pieces, only displayed in parts, and made by tiny satellites cutting razor’s edges over the Earth’s surface that add up over time to some simulation of a flattened map. It all reminds me of a story I heard about the very first “satellite photos” which were taken with regular old SLR cameras pointed out of the window of those rickety old 1960’s spaceships.

Google, the ubiquitous internet search business, has been asked by a US congressional committee why it was “airbrushing history” by replacing post-Hurricane Katrina satellite imagery on its map portal with images of the region as it existed before the storm destroyed neighbourhoods, uprooted trees and smashed bridges.

So far, it’s unclear why the images were changed. Chikai Ohazama, who runs Google Earth, said governments often ask Google - whose corporate motto is “do no evil” - to change its imagery, but New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin says it had no hand in the matter.

From Google Wipes Katrina off the Map

camera, censorship, landscape, perception, photography, remake | No Comments »

Out There Doing It - LA Forum Lecture

October 5, 2006 at 7:30 pm

Sara Daleiden, Therese Kelly, Jenny Price, Emily Scott: L.A. Urban Rangers and Steve Rowell: unplugged from the Center fo Land Use Interpretation.

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Chung King Common

September 8, 2006 6:00 pm to September 9, 2006

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In the age of broadcast media, the spectator was passive and removed from systems of production. Progressives surmised that “activated” spectators would be freed from the influences and illusions produced by the few outlets for mass culture; and the Internet seemed to deliver this vision. Rather than conforming to what is offered, consumers have an enormous array of choices that reflect even the most esoteric interests. Popular fads like weblogs, MySpace, and YouTube call the traditional divisions between production and consumption into question.

While art galleries have generally continued to imitate the store from the product-based economy - offering commodities in exchange for money - popular culture, entertainment, and business have largely adapted to a participatory model, involving the consumer in some degree within the process of production, through feedback, customization, and other forms of interaction. Individuals broadcast their own videos (without calling them art), wear their social relations like jewelry, curate, remix, and redistribute existing cultural works. This confusion of production and consumption, of object and experience, runs against the grain of the art gallery, which prefers that the art experience be something quite distinct from the larger culture.

Activated spectators aren ’t as liberated as we thought they might be. The intermingling of production and consumption generates new possibilities and collectivities, but also new limits and antagonisms. TELIC Arts Exchange explores these issues through the “Chung King Common” during the month of September.

Grass - A new, temporary floor surface for TELIC.

Discotopia - An intermittent, site-specific, interactive disco.

Light Show - A new lighting system at TELIC to sequence the space.

Landscape - Recombinant cardboard units that serve multiple functions.

Wishing Well - Fundraising through optical illusion.

Synth-Rocks - Artificial rocks containing a synthesizer for environmental sound.

WEEKEND SCHEDULE

FRIDAY
6 pm - open
6- 9 pm Dawn Kasper - performance - Dead Drunk
7 - 9 pm acks - sound performance - Campfire Song

FRI + SAT (ON GOING)
Dawn Kasper - video sculpture & stills - Evil Series #18 ‘The Chase’
Andy Kopra - video - Canutillo
Tara Kozuback - video - Jump
Fernando Sanchez - video - My Bas Jan Ader
Discotopia - sound installation - by SCI-Arc students (John Ford, Dohyung Kim, Steve Kim, Ayaka Matsushita ,Coffee Polk and Richard Yoo)

SATURDAY
11 am AAARG meeting and text trading
1 pm Guthrie Lonergan - lecture, surfing the Internet in public

2 - 6 pm Tom Leeser’s Picnic
2 pm Tom Leeser - talk on Social Interstice and the Art of the Picnic
3 pm Kelly Sears - video
3.30pm Fallen Fruit (Dave Burns, Mathias Viegener, Austin Young)
- presentation + fruit
4.30pm Andy Kopra - video
5 pm Sara Roberts - Earbie sound performance
6 pm Emily Lacy - music

8pm Albert Ortega - sound performance

Saturday’s Picnic is held in partnership with the Center for Integrated Media, CalArts

TELIC would like to thank Superior Sod for its generous grass donation, and Adam Shira from The Good Son for vinyl lettering.

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