6.27.2011

Eye Am presents... Wonder Women

Eye Am Screening
July 1st 7pm at:
The Women’s Building
373 Central Avenue
Albany, NY 12206
518.462.2871
www.thewomensbuilding.org/?page_id=75

Eye Am: Women Behind the Lens presents…. “Wonder Women” with films by:
Zulma Aguiar
Vanessa Woods
M. Weimer
Oriana Fox
Annie Novak & Alexis Powell
Holly Clark
Naomi White
Monique Flynn
Sabrina Cardenales
Natalie Halpern
Total program run-time 60 minutes

DAILY PRACTICE by Naomi White (excerpt), 2006
Through the repetition of various everyday routines, we create images of ourselves. In Daily Practice, I employ video to explore issues of balance—the earnest and healthy desires for growth versus rituals that perhaps go too far, and instead consume our identities. Does 'practice' improve who we are, or diminish our reality and sense of self? When do repetition and imitation become obsession, and how do we gauge when a practice that may have once been beneficial has become destructive? By depicting different aspects of ritual /obsession this work investigates how the need to change ourselves can elevate ordinary practices into transformative spells in the drive to become something 'more.' Through imitation, conditioning and practice these characters attempt to create new instinctual behaviors through which they come to understand themselves and their world.

THE JUAREZ MOTHERS by Zulma Aguiar, 2006
Zulma Aguiar is an Electronic Artist originally from Calexico, California in search of "the truth" behind the Ciudad Juarez femicides. She discovers that the only reality she cared about in the end was the stories of the mothers of the femicide victims. Zulma interviewed as many mothers as she could with all of her own personal resources and the support of her university, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and traveled to Juarez several times to meet face to face with the realities of the feminine ground zero. The mothers explain the story one more time and makes the point that in the end the reason why these women are being killed and left to die is simply because they are poor. In the faces of the mothers is where corruption and negligence is expressed with pain and sorrow for their own loss.

UPSTATE GIRLS SCRAPBOOKS by Sabrina Cardenales & Monique Flynn (local filmmakers), 2011
"Upstate Girls" share stories about the challenges in their lives, and the institutions with which they are entwined—including the legal, educational, healthcare and penal systems. Monique & Sabrina’s scrapbook videos are a piece of the story of the young women of Troy and these videos will be archived in the Rensselaer County Historical Society Archives.

THE TOUCH by Vanessa Woods, 2006
A meditation on Anne Sexton’s poem of the same name. The film examines melodies within spoken, written and visual language and how they can interact. By juxtaposing text, image and sound, the viewer is asked to contemplate disparate forms of human response and emotion regarding language and imagery. In The Touch, the text from the poem is first given life through single-frame animation, then layered audio recording and finally through animated visuals that reinterpret it. Language and image investigate feelings of disembodiment, isolation and absence punctuated by sound and silence. Because the subject of the poem deals specifically with the idea of touch, the film sustains a highly tactile, textural quality wherein the filmmaker’s hand is overtly present.

PASSING> 13 THINGS ABOUT NELLA LARSEN by M. Weimer, 2005
Most people have never heard of Nella Larsen, a mixed-race Harlem Renaissance writer, whose career was brilliant but tragically brief. Recently, an increasing amount of scholarly attention has been given to Larsen's work yet there exists a frustrating lack of visual documentation on her life. This video essay/experimental short montages the few existing archival photographs of the writer with contemporaneous found footage. It attempts to introduce this groundbreaking writer to new audiences while reimagining the life of a mysterious woman whose life mirrored her art in its liminality.

NARCISSIUS by Oriana Fox, 2003
Tale of Narcissus is the second in the series of videos in which I have set the words of the popular TV series Sex and The City into the mouths of 1970s feminists, all of whom are played by myself. In this mini-episode Samantha has nude photographs taken in which she poses with chewing-gum vulvas on her body, a gesture mimicking that of the artist, Hannah Wilke.

WE CAN SPREAD THE MESSAGE by Holly Clark (local filmmaker), 2010
Created in the “Trojan Herstories Digital Storytelling Workshop” funded by Holding Our Own, an audio/video oral history project designed to raise awareness about the disfranchisement of women; involving participants in the representation of their communities. This video is Holly’s portrait of CLUW (Coalition of Labor Union Women). For more info visit: www.mediasanctuary.org/node/1916 www.cluw.org

OUR HOPE by Natalie Halpern, 2006
In the villages of western Kenya, AIDS has robbed hundreds of thousands of children of their parents. Who's caring for them? Tumaini Letu (Our Hope) follows the lives, struggles, and indomitable spirit of three women left to care for these orphans. Rasoa Kivairu is raising ten grandchildren. Anna Khautu is a single mother of five. And Anna Aredo has taken in four nephews. With limited resources but great resolve, they must overcome many challenges to ensure these children have a chance at a better future.

WEE DARK HOURS by Annie Novak & Alexis Powell, 2007
A stop motion animation about a mother's love, a singing moon and
stars and the magic of being born. Short and sweet and made with felt!
www.meerkatmedia.org

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home