MIA @ THE ARMORY

LIMBIC RESONANCE
26 APRIL 2013 – 8PM
Nadav Assor – Manfred Borsch – Jeffrey Curtis
Anikó Kuikka – Ashley Morgan – Karin Stohart
Karen Sztajnberg – Antoinette Zwirchmayr

MIA presents video art from eight international artists exploring how individuals experience different types of relationships between people and their bodies.

A security guard and a healer perform as themselves in Feelers (Esotropia Conversations II) (2012) by Nadav Assor, their practices of body-therapy and body-search highlighting the similarities and contrasts of their professions.

An investigation of the body reacting to audio stimulus, limbic (2012) by German artist Manfred Borsch will give you the chills.

Transit (2012) by Jeffrey Curtis, is based on the astronomical phenomenon of the same name, it is an exploration of space, distance, and relationships.

Depicting three stages of romantic relationships, <3 (2012) from Finnish artist Anikó Kuikka, strips the sweetness out of romance.

Using two florescent light bulbs, Ashley Morgan conveys the breakdown of a relationship in Stars Have Their Moment (2012).

Working with an actor and the familiar gesture of a kiss in White Horse (2012), Karin Stohart examines the construction and implications of romantic fantasy.

Based on Daniel J. Siegel’s notion that what we remember are not the feelings associated with an intense experience, but the narrative created while undergoing it, Karen Sztajnberg documents a cast of people remembering of a moment of sexual inadequacy in The Narrative of Inadequacy (2012).

An evocative landscape film, no title (2012) by Austrian artist, Antoinette Zwirchmayr, is a dreamlike meditation on the body.

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MIA presents LIMBIC RESONANCE
8PM – April 26, 2013
The Armory Center for the Arts
145 N. Raymond Ave.
Pasadena, CA 91103

ATTENTIONAL SHIFT
22 March 2013 — 8PM
Rocky Horton – Stephanie Hough – Marco Mendeni
Jessica Miller – Zach Nader – Charmaine Ortiz
Mikey Peterson – Rembrandt Quiballo – Tahir Ün

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MIA presents video art from nine artists working with repetition, manipulation and found footage on March 22nd. These artworks each focus the audience’s attention through selective editing and image manipulation in order to reveal secondary meanings behind the initial surface impression.
THE GAME (2013) from Turkish artist Tahir Ün, interweaves footage taken in the town of Mardin on the Syrian border with footage from the conflict taking place just over that boundary.

Blowout (2012) from Arizona based Rembrandt Quiballo, features video of explosions uploaded by American soldiers during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Chicago based Mikey Peterson gives us Anas Nebula (2012), a stylized one-shot video where a collision dramatically alters the space, displacing the viewer and revealing that patterns made by the human mind are not always what they seem.

From North Carolina based Charmaine Ortiz, Search: “How to Draw a Woman”, Male Perspectives from YouTube Result Pages 1-50 (2012) is compiled from videos by male authors who describe the techniques and attributes necessary to draw a woman while simultaneously revealing their own expectations, prejudices, fears and desires in their instructions as well as visually in their drawings created from memory.

In edited car commercials with the cars, people and text digitally removed, Brooklyn based Zach Nader reveals the spectacular landscapes and our expectations in optional features shown (2012)

At once humourous and poignant, Brooklyn based Jessica Miller consults with psychic mediums in a search for critcal advice from dead artists in The Medium (2012).

Italian artist Marco Mendeni hacks videogames. In FOV01 (2012) he reveals only the digital landscapes that form the backdrop during normal play.

In I Don’t Wanna Talk About It (2012), Irish artist Stephanie Hough removed all of the dialoge from an infomercial, revealing the actors’ unconsious actions and behaviors.

Tennessee based Rocky Horton, gives us a wry take on pop stars and award shows with all the songs God is responsible for according to Grammy Awards acceptance speeches 1971-2012 (2012).

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MIA presents ATTENTIONAL SHIFT
8PM – March 22, 2013
The Armory Center for the Arts
145 N. Raymond Ave.
Pasadena, CA 91103

SAME OCEAN
22 February 2013 – 8PM

Bilsu Hacar – Seth Indigo Carnes
Johannes Gierlinger – Laura Kraning
Marcantonio Lunardi – Diran Lyons
Angelo Picozzi – Carlie Trosclair

MIA is pleased to present SAME OCEAN, a selection of experimental films and video art projects working with historical material. From the dark magik underlying the Jet Propulsion Labratory in the hills above Pasadena to the 45 individual seconds the atom bomb took to detonate over the city of Hiroshima, the machinations of the recent presidential election to the mire of Berlusconi’s Italy, these artworks are recontexturalizing individual moments we collectively recognize with new perspectives and comparisons.
Keep My Pic Sister (2012), from Turkish artist Bilsu Hacar is a short performance documentation that uses a paper cutout of a black burqa.
NYC based Seth Indigo Carnes focuses on 1920s avant-garde cinema, where objects and bodies fracture and dissolve into and through each other. Total Disintigration (2010) is a live cinematic generation working with videos as paint in a palette.
Broken Time (2011) from Austrian artist Johannes Gierlinger riffs on the cut up films of the Beats mixing dismembered pieces of footage with text and manipulated celluloid.
Laura Kraning‘s Devil’s Gate (2011) depicts the physical and mythological terrain of Devil’s Gate Dam, located at the nexus of Pasadena’s historical relationship with technology and the occult, through an examination of Jack Parsons’ writings.
Trilogy of Decadence (2011-2012) by Marcantonio Lunardi evokes the omnipresence of Silvio Berlusconi in the last two decades of Italy’s history and the tension of waiting for a change followed by the 21 days that transformed the political system and sealed his downfall.
In the remix video 99 Problems (2012) by Diran Lyons, Barack Obama raps a modified version of Jay Z’s song by the same name. The revised lyrics cover subjects ranging from Occupy Wall Street, escalating energy costs, bank bailouts, “Fast and Furious,” Obama’s birth certificate, and the use of predator drones.
Scottish artist Angelo Picozzi found a roll of 15 photographs which, upon inspection, contained three photographs taken in Hiroshima, Japan sometime shortly after the atomic bom was dropped over the city. 00:00:45:00 (2007) takes its temporal duration from the time it took “Little Boy” to explode over the city after its release from “Engola Gay.”
An abandoned interior is given a new skin in Carlie Trosclair‘s Kowalsky Intervention (2012) re-structuring and re-imagining our understanding of the physical space.

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MIA presents SAME OCEAN
8PM – February 22, 2013
The Armory Center for the Arts
145 N. Raymond Ave.
Pasadena, CA 91103

WINGED HOST
25 January 2013 – 8PM

Hazem Berrabah – Devon Johnson
Zach Kleyn – Peter Lichter – Nathan Meier
Stephanie Meredith – Jeremy Moss – Alice Wang
Sasha Waters Freyer – Brooke White

MIA’s first screening of 2013 features ten projects on the theme of memory, WINGED HOST. From schoolboys on a class trip to the experience of Alzheimer’s, a family caught in the Cultural Revolution beside the evidence of a family history minus the people these works from the US, China, Hungary and France/Tunisia each offer a view on a different world.
Brooke White uses x-rays of skulls, combined with photographs and 8mm films bringing the viewer into an Alzheimer’s view of the world in Slices of Clarity (2010).

Sasha Waters Freyer‘s, Our Summer Made Her Light Escape (2012) is a wordless 16mm portrait of interiority, maternal ambivalence and the passage of time, exploring the beauty and quotidian cruelties of the natural world right outside one’s door.

The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness (2012) explores Alice Wang‘s family history painfully entwined with the machinations of the Chinese government’s covert operations during WWII and the backlash which caught them in the 1960s. Through the stories of three generations of women and the revisiting of sites of image production from the Cultural Revolution set in Zhenbeibao Western Film Studio, to the Imperial German Qingdao where the artist’s grandfather grew up, the project is an intimate look at how we see, and how we remember.

Jeremy Moss contemplates ideology and place in Those Inescapable Slivers of Celluloid (2011) attempting to apply memory to moving image.

Stephanie Meredith‘s, White Balloon (2012) recomposes another’s memory: claiming it as her own.

Nathan Meier‘s, Transit (2012) is a spontaneous experimentation of juxtaposed colors and images shot on a solitary spool of film in a single day during the transit of Venus.

Peter Lichter‘s, Kazetta/Cassette (2011) reunites childhood friends through an audio recording from their last class trip in 6th grade.

Zach Kleyn‘s, The Rapture, Remembered: Episode 3: Removing All Trace (Of the Family) (2009) shows every frame of a family’s home video archive which does not contain the presence of people, in chronological order.

Devon Johnson‘s, Noms De Pays (2012) is an exploration of involuntary memory and the photographic image after the writings of Marcel Proust.

Hazem Berrabah’s, Maj’noun (2012), freely inspired by “Layla Maj’noun” by Qays Ibn El Moulawah and “Fou d’Elsa” by Louis Aragon, follows a young dancer searching for his absent lover.

8PM – January 25, 2013
The Armory Center for the Arts
145 N. Raymond Ave.
Pasadena, CA 91103

28 December 2012
FAVORITES
from
ANOTHER EXPERIMENT BY WOMEN FILM FESTIVAL

Alessandra Cianelli – Lori Felker & Robert Todd – Angela Ferraiolo
Sasha Waters Freyer – Matoula Eolou Gekko – Noe Kidder
Sally Grizzell Larson – Ana Rodriguez León – Kelly Oliver
Liliana Resnick – Lynne Sachs & Maya Street-Sachs – Cinzia Sarto
Rebecca Louise Tiernan – Lili White – C & A Projects

For the December screening, MIA has invited the Another Experiment By Women Film Festival (AXWFF), curated by Lili White, to present a selection of the festival’s favorites. The AXWFF promotes the work of women making experimental films with screenings at the Anthology Film Archives in New York city.

Alessandra Cianelli, a native of Naples where the octopus plays a central role, tells the Story of the Story of the Octopus with a Heart-Shaped Head (2009).

A travel show taking the audience to a non-space, Lori Felker & Robert Todd explore the duality of place in The Mirrored Curtain (2011).

Angela Ferraiolo‘s Subway (2011) is an generative montage, assembled by a computer using a variety of algorithms to create the final result.

In You Can See the Sun in Late December (2010) Sasha Waters Freyer films evidence of absence, presence and maternity in cold winter light.

Matoula Eolou Gekko’s This Is A Test Reel (2010) is a series of portraits of strangers on the streets of Athens holding up captions the artist had pre-prepared which unfold the artist’s reaction to the financial crisis.

Using a home-made optical printing technique, Noe Kidder experiments with abstracting the image and her own experience of loss in Paradise (2007).

A repetition of images in equally timed segments lull and seduce in Sally Grizzell Larson‘s Axiom (2010).

Ana Rodriguez León takes the audience on a trip from the past to the future in Bell & Howell 2146 XL (2011).

Xmas in the suburbs is juxtaposed with a line from To Kill A Mockingbird, “There are a lot of ugly things in the world. I wish I could protect you from them.” in Kelly Oliver‘s The Borough (2010).

Through superimposed and repeated motifs, Liliana Resnick‘s INSiDE OUT (2011) shows how a cycle of violence empowers a man by destroying a woman.

Lynne Sachs films her daughter Maya Street-Sachs in Same Stream Twice (2011).

Una Sporca Vacanza (Dirty Vacation) (2005) by Cinzia Sarto joins imagery both documentary and digital to depict humans on vacation, indifferent to the reality surrounding them.

Rebecca Louise Tiernan‘s One Mississippi is a psycho-narrative of four girls playing skipping rhymes in a barren field with a lonesome Scarecrow.

A homage to motherhood, Lili White‘s 8 Happinesses in 8 Minutes at the Park (2011) spends a few minutes of time in a shared space with different species.

The mother-daughter collaboration, C & A Projects (Carolyn Radlo and Alanna Simone) investigate the state of the world in a stop motion animation, and this forest will be a desert (2010) – it’s all about plastic, panic and paradise.

7PM – December 28, 2012
The Armory Center for the Arts
145 N. Raymond Ave.
Pasadena, CA 91103

BLACK FRIDAY
a one-night exhibition
23 November 2012 – 7-10PM

Salwa Aleryani – JE Baker – David Beck – Anna Bruinsma
Jose Armando de Miranda Filho – Courtney Kessel – Muriel Montini
Chee Wang Ng – Timothy David Orme – Katarzyna Pagowska
Tara Raye Russo – Viktoria Schmid – Lili White – Sasha Zuwolinsky

The MIA screening series presents a one-night exhibition, BLACK FRIDAY. Serious and sarcastic, earnest and hilarious, we’re kicking off the holiday season with a selection of video art from around the world working with issues around food, family and tradition.
Salwa Aleryani & Sasha Zuwolinsky’s Repast (2010) reflects on the nurishing role of culinary practices in relationships and collective identity.
Pietà (2012) by JE Baker depicts rituals of birth, baptism and death through the image of a dead fawn bathed by a female figure.
In Smorgasbord (After Per Lysne) (2012), David Beck animates the curling leaves of “rosemaling,” a style of decoration traditional in rural Norway.
Anna Bruinsma’s Outlandish Pudding (2011) is a series of awkward, semi-erotic encounters with food at family dinners, followed by a very dirty ballet.
Jeremy Eichenbaum provides an easy to follow users guide to making mashed po-video-taters in Mash it up (2012).
Brazilian artist, Jose Armando de Miranda Filho’s Autre-chienne (2012) is an irreverent satire of Marie Antoinette’s “let them eat cake.”
In Balance With (2012) by Courtney Kessel documents the artist’s performance with her seven-year-old daughter on a 16 foot seesaw, where Kessel adds representative items of their lives to her daughter’s side of the seesaw until their weights are in balance.
French artist Muriel Montini tells the story of an offhand comment her father made which has haunted her the rest of her life in Instants d’après/Future anterior (2007).
In 108 Global Rice Bowls (2008) Chee Wang Ng investigates the global Chinese diaspora in a series of bowls of rice, one for each bead in a Buddhist rosary, a complete prayer cycle.
Timothy David Orme’s Mouth (2012) is an erasure film with a poem read over the visuals where the artist has used a razor blade to scrape away the image in found footage.
Lukrowane-Lukratywne/Sweet Deal (2012) by Polish artist Katarzyna Pagowska is a response to global mega-events like Euro 2012 (which was held this year in Poland) where ever more explicit manifestations of the rebirth of nationalistic movements are being seen.
Tara Raye Russo’s My Talent Is Art (2011) conjures early conversations with family members who at once discouraged and encouraged her budding interest in artmaking.
Made entirely of photograms, where the ingredients of four dishes making up a symbolic menu were placed directly onto the filmstock, Austrian artist Viktoria Schmid’s Foodfilms (2010) were made in the darkroom without using a camera of any kind.
Collaged images and spoken texts create a cacophany of ideas and images articulating the intersection between nature and civilization in everything, BUT (2011) by Lili White.

MIA presents BLACK FRIDAY
a one-night exhibition
7-10PM – 23 November 2012
Armory Center for the Arts
145 North Raymond Avenue
Pasadena, CA 91103

NOT APPLICABLE
26 October 2012
Peter T. Christenson – Ralph Dorey – Joe Casey Doyle – Clint Enns
CD Howe – Chris Ritson – Leyla Rodriguez – Cristian Straub – s.ara
Toby Tatum – Coalfather Industries (Kara Jansson and Craig Newsom)
The Isle of Lox series from collaborators Leyla Rodriguez & Cristian Straub is represented in two chapters, the first marking the beginning of the travel mysteries and the second celebrating a ritual of blending in to the pink situation.

Chris Ritson’s Tragic Chemistry is concerned with growth and copying. Crystals preserve their formal arrangement as they grow, snap and branch further through new facets. This hereditary copying is the essence of living systems, and often life is defined as that which persists via copying.

I See You from Coalfather Industries (Kara Jansson and Craig Newsom) navigates the uncomfortable conversation between voyeur and exhibitionist that we experience online. The collective web does nothing to ameliorate our loneliness, and functions as little more than a sterile echo chamber where we know more and tell more, but care less. A commentary on the contemporary experience, Jansson and Newsom juxtapose the mundane aspects of everyday life, removing them from their original context to highlight their absurdity.

Peter T. Christenson’s Relational Plane Rich Flight 209 is a “thematically networked narrative,” a consciousness stream fostered through the merging and repurposing of appropriated video footage and found audio segments. Clips were selected based on their similar depictions and presentations of symbolic and economic capital in popular culture and ultimately assembled to create
a fluid storyline.

Joe Casey Doyle molts strands of purple ribbon in I AM MY OWN CHEERLEADER, transforming himself and revealing a purple letterman’s sweater hand-knit from curling ribbon.

Clint Enns’ (e̺͙̟̠̜̰ͅb̠͚͙͓͎b͇̲s̞͍̤͔ͅ ̺a̬̞ͅn̝̦ͅd̳̩͙̯ ͕͔̙f͚̹͉͚̬ͅl̖o̼w̦s͎͓͇) is a meditative video exploring a transition from truth to loving kindness.

Toby Tatum’s The Subterraneans is a series of visions relayed through a heightened consciousness. The views frame the shadowy recesses that offer access to the underworld and draw us closer to the presences that lurk beyond the threshold.

Ralph Dorey’s Pot Healers explores questions of détournement, assimilation and the plane immanence as discussed by two characters engaged in gluing things together.

CD Howe’s Neural Network was created using EEG recordings of the artist’s brain activity in a variety of states. This data was assigned numeric color values and projected onto a standing wave of water which corresponded to the dominant recorded brain wave.

s.ara’s Tape Loading Error is an animation exploring the visual culture of video games and the spread of popular gif files. Magritte’s surrealist paintings give a working platform for modular elements and texture layers that emulate lo-fi quality and bug/glitch images of early computers

MIA presents NOT APPLICABLE
7PM – 26 October 2012
Armory Center for the Arts
145 North Raymond Avenue
Pasadena, CA 91103