Community Action Center

Craftswoman House and WCCW present:

Community Action Center
Monday, August 25, 8:30pm

followed by a Q & A with A.L. Steiner

Echo Chamber Creative Headquarters 

1519 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, CA. 90026

Community Action Center is a sociosexual video by A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner which incorporates the erotics of a community where the personal is not only political, but sexual. This project was heavily inspired by porn-romance-liberation films, which served as distinct portraits of the urban inhabitants, landscapes and the body politic of a particular time and place. 

The film will be followed by a Q & A with A.L. Steiner, a multi-media artist who works in photography, video, installation, collage, performance, writing and curating, often through a collaborative process.

Facebook invite here.

Dear Comrade

Craftswoman House and WCCW present:

Dear Comrade
Monday, August 18, 8:30pm

followed by a Q & A with Mady Schutzman

Echo Chamber Creative Headquarters 

1519 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, CA. 90026

Written and directed by Mady Schutzman, Dear Comrade is an experimental essay film that documents the story of Llano del Rio (1914-18), the most important non-religious communitarian experiment in western American history. Llano is offered as a site to explore the struggles, courage, frustrations, fantasies, and Sisyphean efforts of innumerable idealists who have assumed comparable struggles in spite of tremendous odds. The story is told through archival footage, surreal re-enactments, interviews with ex-colonists, local residents and historians, and the meanderings of a silent nomad through the ruins of the Llano colony in the Mojave Desert. Through the intersection of stories, a seemingly traditional documentary morphs into a montage of parallel universes, political commentary, clownery, and a palpable desire—failings and disappointments notwithstanding—to give idealism and cooperation another try.

Facebook invite here.

The Punk Singer

The Punk Singer

a film about Kathleen Hanna

Q & A with Sini Anderson

August 11th

8:30pm

Echo Chamber Creative Headquarters: 1519 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, CA. 90026

 Sini Anderson's The Punk Singer centers on feminist icon Kathleen Hanna, lead singer of Bikini Kill, Le Tigre and a fierce voice of the riot grrrl movement. Through twenty years of archival footage and intimate interviews with Hanna, The Punk Singer offers a unique glimpse into the life of a fearless leader of contemporary feminism.

The film will be followed by a Q & A with Sini Anderson, film director, producer, performance artist and poet. 

RSVP and get tickets here. 

A Feminist Film Series

Every Monday evening throughout the month of August, Craftswoman House partners with Women's Center for Creative Work to present A Feminist Film Screening Series at the Echo Chamber in Echo Park. On August 4th we'll be screening a selection of short films by Nancy Holt, an artist known for her installation art, public works, film and photo work, and as "a pioneer in the land-art movement of the 1960s and ’70s and the creator of one of the era’s most poetic works — “Sun Tunnels,” four huge concrete culverts set in the Utah desert to align with the sun on summer and winter solstices." (NY Times, 2014). 

The films will be accompanied by a brief introduction to Holt's filmic work by Aurora Tang. Tang is a researcher, curator, and program manager at the Center for Land Use Interpretation and the managing director of High Desert Test Sites.

A suggested donation of $5-$20 goes to provide snacks and drinks, a stipend to those presenting the film, and to support the ongoing activities of the WCCW. Space is limited to 40 people, and priority will be given to those who RSVP ahead of time. Snacks, sodas and water will be provided. Please RSVP on the google doc on the Facebook invite here.

Films begin at 8:30
Echo Chamber Creative Headquarters: 1519 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, CA. 90026

Upcoming films in the series:
August 11th:  The Punk Singer and Q&A with director Sini Anderson.
August 18th: Dear Comrade and Q&A with director Mady Schutzman
August 25th: Community Action Center and Q&A with director A.L. Steiner

Haunted

Haunted 

a video screening by Craftswoman House

7-9pm  Friday, July 18th

Winslow Garage
3540 Winslow Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90026

Featuring works by:

Ursula Brookbank, Min Choi, Anne Colvin,

Micol Hebron, Nina Lassila, Elizabeth Leister, 

Shana Robbins and Alberto Roman, Simone Stoll, 

Tracy Abbott Szatan and Marisa Williamson.

Program will loop between 7-9pm staring roughly on the half-hour

Throughout history, creative works by women have often been devalued, dismissed, and even buried. While women’s contributions to art and culture have been more visible in recent years, blind spots still exist. Feminist art of the 1970s serves as a profound antecedent to contemporary art, but rich bodies of feminist work are barely acknowledged in discussions on current art practices including relational aesthetics and the prevalent use of informal and domestic materials. The artists in Haunted explore the hollows of history, to wake ghosts and channel hidden voices. These artists express a fluid exchange between the body and memory through a focus on tactile experience, manifestations of the repressed female body, and an emphasis on process as a means to capture the immaterial.

image: Ursula Brookbank HM.GDN3


Video Program:

HM.GDN.1
Ursula Brookbank
1:47

HM.GDN.1 and HM.GDN.3, 2007-2008 are from a series of videos created for the Viralnet.net collective project called Home and Garden, a web based curatorial initiative. The two videos combine voice by Bette Burgoyne and sound by amk ( for HM.DN.3 ) to conjure secret domestic spaces and their feminine occupants.

Rain
Simone Stoll
1:30

Rain is an imaginary walk on a tightrope, a two-layered poetic video in shades of grey with rhythmic sound of drops colliding.

Piiskaa!
Nina Lassila
1:13

In Piiskaa!/Beat it! we see a woman cleaning a carpet. There is something provocative about a physical woman; even a loud laugh can provoke some people. There is a prevailing notion that a loud physical woman is somehow deranged; out of control.

Love Letter for a Girl
Min Choi
7:30

Love Letter for a Girl explores the relationship between girls and their desires within the spectatorship of blog culture. The camera views a reflective monitor, with scrolling images collected from online apparel shops and blogs. The ambiguous relationship between the female narrator and images of girls reflects women’s ambivalent position both as objects and subjects of desire.

Miss Calpurnia
Anne Colvin
1:14

A simple structuralist film where the editing process – the change of speed, direction, repetition, jump cuts, residual sound and color shifts – become the film-time and the film- image. Stripped bare, a re-filmed and deconstructed fragment allows the simple act of chasing after a scarf in the wind to build into a visual score.

Vista
Elizabeth Leister
4:54

Vista traverses invisible dangers in the seeming innocence of nature and offers simultaneously claustrophobic and protected spaces. The camera traces a path through a confined labyrinth, while on the soundtrack a woman whispers a poem by a Dutch mystic that envisions what it would be like to occupy a vast space. Threat and possibility coexist in the sounds of a body running, a momentary picture of possibly infinite space, and the artist’s reading of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.

Angry Feminist
Micol Hebron
2:14

Angry Feminist is a video composed of only texts. This video is a sequence of alternating phrases from four sources: clichés about feminism; famous feminist slogans and quotes; stereotypical phrases exchanged between two lovers or ex-lovers; statements that artists make about their creative process.

HM.GDN.3
Ursula Brookbank
1:30

Black Dinner Party
Marisa Williamson
4:19

This work features youtube video footage of activist, Angela Davis, entertainer and philanthropist, Oprah Winfrey, and pop star, Beyonce Knowles.

Lucid Risings
Shana Robbins & Alberto Roman
1: 49

Lucid Rising uses Phantasmaphysics to dislodge the distinction between materiality and immateriality. Before meaning and coherence arise, a secret exchange between human embodiment and the earth takes place that gives rise to both through veiled nuptials.

Woman Pacing
Nina Lassila
1:23

We see a pair of feet moving rapidly back and forth over a floor, as a voiceover talks about an artist woman who has issues with her artistic work.

Ambrosia
Tracy Abbott Szatan
2:52

Ambiguously received is the ambrosial dawn, the transformation, the delight and solemnity offered. In Greek mythology, ambrosia is a drink, food or perfume of the Gods, granting immortality to the individual who receives it. In Ambrosia, a figure moves between and across landscapes, physical, psychological and emotional states, dissolves into and is reconstituted by and from them.

Surface Tensions

Jemima Wyman                                                        Liz Nurenberg

an evening of performance with works 

by Brian Getnick, Kate Hoffman, 

Liz Nurenberg, and Jemima Wyman

Thursday June 19th, 7-9pm 

ILGWU 346 E 3rd Street, Long Beach, CA 90802

Surface Tensions features works that address gender through body and process-based performances that explore tactile and sensory experience, skins and surfaces, narratives expressed through materials, and the intersection of fashion and performance.

Liz Nurenberg’s work counteracts the isolation of modern technology by engaging the full body and senses of her audience. She explores intimacy, awkwardness, and the boundaries of personal space through soft sculptures that act as props for viewers to use or inhabit. Nurenberg creates situations that allow the body or multiple bodies to become material for the performative outcome of the work.

In a series of body-based works, Kate Hoffman focuses on daily routines that accumulate into a combined mass of body memory and consumption. In these works, her sculptural moldings of the negative space (which her body has created through small repeated gestures) results in abstract objects which reference artifacts and the decorative objects of pop culture. In this iteration the project, the artist invites you to exchange and experience these interior spaces as they merge with your own.

Brian Getnick creates arenas for performance through a process of sculpting architectural set pieces and hand sewn costumes which evolve in relationship to a constant dialog with the performers. Getnick explores how we both resist and are shaped by cultural forces such as collective memory, education and nationalism. 

By wearing a crazy quilt of masks Jemima Wyman will embody, rearrange and reconfigure the face of protest - her face pushed to face the ‘in-between’ and hybrid masks of recent protests. These ‘in-between’ masks where found through Wyman’s research and include the commercialized Guy Fawkes mask of Anonymous painted black (by black bloc), appropriated Waq’ollos mask (by Free Pussy Riot protestors that appear to merge the colorful knitted balaclava with the public face of Anonymous) and more. Wyman shifts her voice to occupy each mask inviting you to witness the various modes of resistance needed to wrestle with power.

                                                                                                               Kate Hoffman

About the artists:

Brian Getnick received a BA in art from Vassar College in 1998 and his MFA in Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004. In 2008 he was nominated for the fourth annual performance prize through the Galleria Civica in Trento Italy. Getnick's performances have been seen at Station Independent Projects in New York City, at Honor Fraser Gallery, Red Cat, and Machine Projects in Los Angeles and at Croxhapox in Gent Belgium. He currently co directs Native Strategies, a journal and performance art platform with Tanya Rubbak, and is the director of PAM, a theater space and artist residency in Highland Park.

Kate m.s. Hoffman is a visual artist living and working in Los Angeles. She received her BFA in Fibers from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and an MFA in Visual Art from the University of California, San Diego. She has been an artist in residence at the Banff Centre in Banff, Canada, Birch Creek Ranch in Utah and at Centre Est-Nord-Est in Quebec. In 2012, she had solo exhibitions of her project Black Gold-Liquid Gold, the Golden Age of Whaling at the Greenleaf Gallery at Whittier College and at the ATA Gallery in San Francisco. Most recently she has participated in the performance and exhibition events of Squaring the Circle in Llano del Rio and Art School at Human Resources.

Liz Nurenberg is a Los Angeles based artist who received her MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2010. Primarily working sculpturally, her interactive objects are props for experiences in which viewers can form relationships both to the work and to other viewers. In her work, interactivity explores intimacy, awkwardness, proximity, personal space, and touch.

Jemima Wyman is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. In 2007, she graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from The California Institute of Arts in Los Angeles. Wyman’s individual practice spans various mediums and 
focuses on the politics of fabric in conflict and in protest. She has exhibited at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art (Japan), the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (Melbourne), Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney) and Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles). In 2012 for The Unexpected Guest: Liverpool Biennial, Wyman was commissioned by FACT to make a large-scale public engagement project. Her most recent solo exhibitions include Effacing Power at Steve Turner Contemporary in Los Angeles and Pattern Bandits at the Gallery of Modern Art in Australia. For the past nine years she has also collaborated with Anna Mayer as CamLab. 

Secrets and Confessions

Secrets and Confessions: new works by Liz Young

Saturday, June 14th  6-10pm

ILGWU

346 E. 3rd Street

Long Beach, CA 90802

Join Craftswoman House on Saturday June 14th for Secrets and Confessions, a series of new pieces by Liz Young. For this project, Young collected private confessions from anonymous participants and embroidered their words onto the surface of found objects. Young serves as an unreliable confident as secrets are transferred from the private to the public realm. Her process reflects the way that secrets often circulate in our daily lives, and she invites viewers to divulge their own confessions as contributions to the exhibit.

Saturdays June 21 & June 28, 12-4: Liz Young will offer open workshops to introduce students to the materials and techniques of hand embroidery. She will teach students basic skills such as stabilizing and hooping, design placement, and a variety of hand stitches. During these workshops, students may choose to contribute their own secrets and confessions to Young’s exhibition.

June Residency at ILGWU

                                                                                                 photo by Carol Cheh

For the month of June, Craftswoman House will be in residence at the Institute for Labor Generosity Workers and Uniforms in Long Beach. Save the date for these upcoming events: 

Saturday June 14th, 6-10pm: Secrets and Confessions features a series of new pieces by Liz Young. For this project, Young collected private confessions from anonymous participants and embroidered their words onto the surface of found objects. Young serves as an unreliable confident as secrets are transferred from the private to the public realm. Her process reflects  the way that secrets often circulate in our daily lives, and she invites viewers to divulge their own confessions as contributions to the exhibit.

Thursday June 19th, 7-9pm: Surface Tensions an evening of performance with works by Brian Getnick, Kate Hoffman, Liz Nurenberg, Molly Shea, and Jemima Wyman. The event will  feature works that address gender through body and process-based performances that explore tactile and sensory experience, skins and surfaces, narratives expressed through materials, and the intersection of fashion and performance.

 
Saturdays June 21 & June 28, 12-4: Liz Young will offer open workshops to introduce students to the materials and techniques of hand embroidery. She will teach students basic skills such as stabilizing and hooping, design placement, and a variety of hand stitches. During these workshops, students may choose to contribute their own secrets and confessions to Young’s exhibition.

Squaring the Circle: Llano del Rio Centennial

30 ARTISTS, A ONE-DAY EVENT AT THE 
SITE OF THE FORMER LLANO DEL RIO COLONY  
IN HONOR OF ITS CENTENNIAL.

Craftswoman House and Hinterculture present Squaring the Circle: Llano del Rio Centennial an interdisciplinary arts event on Saturday, May 3rd, 2014 from 1 pm to 6pm with site specific installations and performances on view to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Llano del Rio Cooperative Colony, a utopian socialist community established in 1914 by Job Harriman in Southern California’s Antelope Valley. The event participants who reflect diversity in their work as historians, visual artists, filmmakers, writers, choreographers, dancers, musicians, activists, and transdisciplinary practitioners responding to questions that Llano inspires. How does site-specific place, and the historical archive relate to artists and their contemporary expression? How has the categorization of Feminism, Socialism, Utopia and Collaboration shaped artists' practices? Can we square the circle and propose evolution into an alternative future?

Squaring the Circle begins at 1pm and will run through 6pm, with performances planned throughout the day. Visitors will be able to navigate the space viewing and interacting with performances and installations, learning about the history of the colony, and experiencing the surrounding terrain.

Preview pieces of Judy Branfman’s The Land of Orange Groves and Jails, documenting her reluctant great-aunt Yetta’s tale of 1920s Los Angeles’ free speech and labor battles - and providing a backdrop to the political sphere and tensions of the early 1900s. Visitors can contribute to this documentary film-in-progress on May 3rd, by responding to the prompt: “Have you ever stood up for something you believe in?   

“Has your town ever done anything for you?” Jessica Cowley and Lyra Kilston will install signage that commemorates Llano del Rio and its place as a historical landmark, connecting the political and economic concerns of Llano’s residents to our present day.

Paul Greenstein & Dydia DeLyser engage the history of the colony through the integration of installation art, historical exhibit and documentary photography in a period-appropriate interpretative tent.

Inspired by Dolores Hayden’s essay Two Utopian Feminists and their Campaigns for Kitchenless Houses, Rachel Finkelstein will perform the drudgery of domestic labor and ask us to consider, “why are women still doing the dishes?”

To explore the fate of the energy exerted in following one’s vision, Kate Hoffman will create every rejected project proposal she has submitted since moving to LA five years ago within a constructed space that mimics Alice Constance Austin's planned layout for Llano.

Open a drawer from the cab in net space in this experimental sound and video performance that bridges time and space to another dimension with the layered sights and sounds of Jennifer from JC Penney featuring Moxy Fofo.

The LA Art Girls’ Make Camp is an instant city considering Alice Constance Austin’s designs for kitchenless homes and communal kitchens within the desert environment through food preparation workshops, a cement circular gathering space and a net-like form crocheted from cast-off electric cables and cords.

Elizabeth Leister will present a performance through looping motions that repeat without progress. Her Sisyphus-like act suggests the failure of the Llano project and more generally the absurdity of life.

Opera del Espacio will create real-time, architecturally inspired movement-based performances, interacting with the ruins as well as concurrent events.

Minna Philips will install a project that allows for individual experience within a communal space, through the creation of "windows" that will assist in fragmenting the landscape to resist wholeness.

Linda Ravenswood will engage the audience to become a chain of solidarity through presence and vocalization, as she undertakes the overwhelming task of digging a hole with kitchen implements such as spoons and ladles.

Michelle Rozic’s cyanotypes of litter and ocean flora printed on fabric and wrapped around rocks will create a mirage in the existing washes of the site, highlighting the scarcity of water in Southern California alongside the water issues which displaced the colonists to New Llano Louisiana in 1918.

Dear Comrade, Mady Schutzman’s experimental essay film documents the story of Llano del Rio, as told through archival footage, surreal re-enactments, interviews with ex-colonists, local residents and historians, and the meanderings of a silent nomad through the ruins of the Llano colony in the Mojave Desert.

Inspired by the remote, desert landscape surrounding Llano del Rio and the historical significance of open land as a place for experimental societies to flourish, Semi-Tropic Spiritualist will create an outpost in unoccupied territory. The installation will feature ritual objects, including orientation and divination tools, as well as the introduction of the Semi-Tropic Spiritualist Tract.

Stacey Spiegel presents a star tetrahedron of 18 mirrors inspired by Austin’s city plans the piece explores how different open spaces can exist simultaneously.

SuarezDanceTheatre premieres Mother.Work a performance where the idealism and realities of the Llano colony becomes the lens to examine economics of 21st century motherhood and family life where boldness, sparseness, shedding, rejecting, entanglements, failure and freedom congregate in the wind of the sparse landscape and its decayed ransacked stone buildings.

Leora Wien reimagines a May Day ceremony, integrating pagan rites of renewal and fertility, Llano del Rio's own International Workers Day maypole, and contemporary feminist punk protest songs.

Find our Facebook invite here.

Link to an expedition map here.

A podcast that features historical information, sound art, narrative works, and interviews about Llano del Rio is available for download at:https://soundcloud.com/temporaryresidence/the-next-step-a-journey-to

Thank you to the shareholders that make Squaring the Circle possible!

Karen Adelman, Stephanie Allespach, Anonymous, Lani Asuncion, Carrie Bryden, Karen Carrie, York Chang, Chris Coffey, Andrea Collins, Sydney Croskery, Drake Cunningham, Carmela Herman Dietrich, Cassandra Douglas, Chris Duffy, Christine Emmert, Kristi Engle, Rachel Finkelstein, Gregg Fleishman, Jennie Fleming, Sara Fowler, Alexandra Grant, Robby Herbst, Janet Jeffers, Tim Kirk, Wendy Koenig, Elizabeth Leister, Astrid Reed Leonard, Meg Madison, Rheagan Martin, Siofra McSherry, Robert Nashak, Heather O'Brien, Lou Pepe, Carrie Paterson, Christine Peterson, Davelene Pollock, Mary Anna Pomonis, Melissa Potter, David Prince, , Kristin Rey, Warren Scherich, Bill Sebring, Astri Swendsrud, Christine Suarez, Paige Tighe, Julie Vogel, Nick West, Sarah Williams, Marisa Williamson, Allison Wyper, Liz Young

Squaring the Circle

Last September Craftswoman House organized an exploratory trip to the ruins of Llano del Rio in preparation for a project with Hinterculture to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the colony. Now, we are excited to announce details about Squaring the Circle, the centennial event scheduled for May 3, 2014. The event will feature over thirty participants who work as historians, visual artists, filmmakers, writers, choreographers, dancers, musicians, activists, and interdisciplinary practitioners.

We face distinct challenges working in a remote desert environment and have launched a campaign to raise funds to cover costs associated with the production and documentation of the event. To learn more about the project and view our video, check out our Squaring the Circle page here. 

Please become a shareholder in the Squaring the Circle community. Choose your level of support and help us build a new collective vision of Llano del Rio!

Squaring the Circle: Llano del Rio Centennial

Saturday May 3, 2014 1pm to dusk

Temporary installations by Jessica Cowley & Lyra Kiltson, Michelle Rozic, Karyl Newman, Larissa Nickel, Minna Phillips, and Stacey Spiegel

Performances by LA Art Girls, Olivia de Haulleville, Rachel Finkelstein, Kate Hoffman, Jennifer from JC Penney, Elizabeth Leister, Opera del Espacio, Linda Ravenswood, Semi-Tropic Spiritualists, Leora Wien, and SuarezDanceTheater

Film screenings by Judy Branfman and Mady Schutzman

And historical walking tours lead by Dr. Dydia DeLyser and Paul Greenstein co-author of the book Bread and Hyacinths: The Rise and Fall of Utopian Los Angeles.

SEE YOU IN LLANO!

Craftswoman House and Hinterculture announce details for Squaring the Circle: Llano del Rio Centennial. Please check out our Indiegogo campaign and consider becoming a shareholder.