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.