Rachael Guma setting up her piece 18FPS,45RPM,3 SPI. (Photo: Mari Babao)
C+A PROJECTS comprises Carolyn Radlo and Alanna Simone, artists based in California. They collaborate on projects which deal with social and political situations communicated through sparse text and evocative imagery. They like to work with words, images, and meaning without necessarily relying on narrative or linearity. Many of their projects focus on the exchange of ideas between them, the differences and similarities that show up in their work made side by side, but always guided and supported by chance. Their life-long, multi-faceted collaboration has, in recent years, evolved from mother-daughter to artist-artist.
Concerning and this forest will be a desert (shown in this festival) and Rice Relief (screened by AXWFF this past summer) they have written: “The planet is in peril and humans have their heads filled with ideas and fantasies that are like strung-out dreams. When you hear people talk, it is astonishing sometimes to learn what fears motivate them, what greed. The unconscious incentives which move people to act — or not to act — in response to the needs of the world around them are fascinating, literally. They are projections and make-believe. We offer no solutions, but we try to unpack the stories, see the patterns, connect the dots.”
and this forest will be a desert was premiered in A Little Something Serious at Brooks Institute in Ventura, CA (Nov. 2010) and was included in the group show, GONE at Southern Exposure in San Francisco, CA (Dec. 2010). It was screened again this May as part of the No Dialogue show at the art fair, ArtPadSF, in San Francisco. It was also chosen for the Shorts program of the AND (Abandon Normal Devices) Festival in Liverpool UK http://thecarolynandalannashow.com
ALESSANDRA CIANELLI lives and works in Naples. Graduate: Fine Arts Accademy in Naples; Philosophy at I.U.O Naples. Her art practiceis relational — since 2004 she has utilized her background as set/stage designer and combined traditional expressive arts of sculpture and painting and drawing, incorporating them with current media technologies, photography, video and performance. She investigates contemporary society in terms of identity, memories, processes of construction/de-construction of myths and rites, with a focus on the loss of identity and social disintegration involving villages and rural areas as residual landscapes.
CARYN CLINE is a filmmaker and teacher, originally from the Ozarks in southwest Missouri. Her film festival screenings include the Crossroads Festival (San Francisco), the London International Animation Festival, Experiments in Cinema 6.3 (Albuquerque, NM), the Melbourne Animation Festival (Australia), the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival (Czech Republic), the Madcat International Women’s Film and Video Festival, New Filmmakers (NYC), Women in the Director’s Chair, the Southwest Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, the Iowa City Documentary Film Festival, and the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival. She lives and works in New York City and Seattle, Washington.
ALICE COHEN has been a long-time musician and composer, who has also worked with collage and other visual art, before getting into animation. When she began to animate her collages, she found new ways to experiment visually with rhythm, to play with the interaction of music and image, and to make unconscious dream worlds visible. Obsessed with hunting for old books, magazines, and anything containing forgotten imagery…sometimes even discarded things found in the street…the act of taking these cast-off and random images, and re-combining them to create new imaginary environments, is a driving force. Fueled by the element of chance in the randomness of what is found, combined with the freedom to experiment with an endless variety of re-combining, Cohen finds the process analogous to alchemy….scavenged images from different eras and sources, sometimes as humble as an old magazine picked from the trash, can be transformed into something beautiful and magical. Favorite themes: forgotten beauty of the past such as vintage actresses/models from the 20s and 30s…the hairdos, make-up, clothes and glamour of lost eras…Playful aspects of femininity, played out through inner journeys, not unlike Alice’s adventures through the looking glass.
ANABELA COSTA 1958 b. Lisbon, Portugal. Lives in Paris. Visual Artist, studies Fine Arts at Lisbon Fine Arts University (1980) Independent filmmaker working with moving image in experimental animation, has the esthetic of movement, the creation of movement as main goals and mixing it with projects that problematise concepts, relations, between art and science. Her paper on wwwanabelacosta.blogspot.com reflects on virtual reality ability to to turn an artist’s “imaginary vision” turn into “reality”. http://mywindowanabelacosta.blogspot.com
LORI FELKER chose Filmmaking as her official second language in 2003-ish, bumping German into third place. Eventual fluency is important to her, so she employs many forms/formats, practices frequently with others, and tries hard not to shy away from expressing her thoughts on human behavior, travel, inter-activity, frustration, failure and political irritants. Lori has many lives to live simultaneously. They currently live, make films/videos, teach, project, curate, and compulsively collaborate in Chicago.
Currently faculty and staff at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA 2007) and the Festival Coordinator for the Chicago Underground Film Festival. Her work has screened at the Rotterdam International Film Festival; NYFF: Views from the Avant-Garde; VideoEx, Zurich; Festival du Nouveau Cinema, Montreal; Curtas Vila do Conde Film Festival, Portugal; Wexner Center for the Arts; MassArt Film Society; MuHKA_media, Belgium; Boston Underground Film Festival; Video Fest, Dallas; Florida Experimental Film Festival; Space Gallery, Pittsburgh. She is an Illinois Arts Council Artists Grant recipient, a Wexner Center Artist in Residence, and a Fulbright Fellow (Berlin)www.FelkerCommaLori.com
ANGELA FERRAIOLO is a writer and filmmaker who is exploring how computational and procedural practices might affect the traditions of literature and art cinema. Her work has screened at the New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant Garde, the Australian International Experimental Film Festival, and at the International Conference of Generative Art in Rome. Professionally she has worked at H20 Productions, Westwood Studios, and Electronic Arts. Her plays have been produced at Expanded Arts and La Mama Galleria in New York, and at the Brick Playhouse in Philadelphia. She has an MFA in Media Arts from Hunter College. She is currently the Electronic Writing Fellow at Brown University, and a guest faculty member in Visual Arts at Sarah Lawrence College.
MATOULS EOLOU GEKKO is Daphné Hérétakis’s alter ego.
She lives in Paris and Athens and has been making documentaries and experimental short and medium length films since 2008.
RACHAEL GUMA is a filmmaker and sound artist currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Through her experiments with Super 8 film and analog sound, Rachael strives to create an engaging live viewing experience that embraces the idiosyncratic qualities of technology, while maintaining a hand-crafted approach to her output. Ever since graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute, her films have screened at the San Francisco Cinematheque, RX Gallery, Mono No Aware, Northern Flickers, and Microscope Gallery. As a member of Optipus Film Collective, she has performed live foley sound at Participant Gallery, Dense Mesh IV, and the 2011 Index Festival. STATEMENT: When I think of foley, I automatically picture someone watching a film with shoes on their hands, following the footsteps of the actor on the screen. Foley is an integral part of the post sound process in traditional filmmaking, covering up mistakes and/or enhancing those sounds that were not caught on set. What initially sparked my interest in this process is when I found out that many times foley artists use crumpling paper to re-create the sound of fire. It seemed so artificial …in the best possible way. In a live sound space this creates many challenges, but infinite possibilities. Learning about mic and feedback patterns is a large part of it, as well as determining the image/sound relationships. It’s that one plus one equals ONE equation.
MO HYUN-SHIN, Birth 1980 Undergraduate degree was French literature. Now, is studying Filmmaking (MFA) at Yon-sei Graduate School of Communication & Arts. “Handmaid” is the first experiment film.
NOE KIDDER directs films from her sense of place and history. In “My Father Was a Gangster,” Noe set out to make a portrait of herself as a missing person in New York City and ended up taking a portrait of her friend Tin, who tells a childhood story about her father in Singapore.She is inspired by Nature itself, and the mirror that art makes with it. She directs films from a sense of place and history, with much work generated in the presence of others.
COURTNEY KRANTZ is based in Brooklyn, NY. She makes work within the realms of the still and moving image as well as installation and performance-based pieces. Her filmic inquiries are influenced by her considerations of the body, which originate from her exploratory investigations of dance and improvisational movement practices. She sees the choreographic potentialities between the moving body and the moving cinematic frame as an evolving source of inspiration and challenge.
KYJA KRISTJANSSON-NELSON has screened her films in Asia, Europe, North America and Australia, at venues such as the Walker Art Center, the National Museum for Women in the Arts, the European Media Arts Festival, and the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art. Her work has received awards, including the Kodak Vision Award for Best Cinematography, the Ann Arbor Griot Best Editing Award, and the Moondance Calypso Award. Kyja has received fellowships from the Fulbright Association, the Bush Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. Kyja is an Associate Professor of Cinema Arts at Minnesota State University Moorhead
NANDITA KUMAR is a multi-faceted, award winning filmaker, multi media artist, painter and performer. She has completed her Masters Degree in Experimental Animation at California Institute of the Arts, in Los Angeles. Nandita’s artistic expressions have shown in various festivals and exhibitions throughout the world including Los Angeles county Museum(LACMA) along with the Salvador Dali Exhibit, REDCAT, The New Zealand International Film Festival, Film Anthology Archive NY, Indian Art Summit, The Rome International Film festival, Stuttgart Animation Festival, The Academy of Television Art and Sciences in Los Angeles and the Best of Sydney Underground Festival DVD.In her work she explores the elemental process by which human beings construct meaning from their experience. It is the dynamic process of interplay between events, self and culture. Her art metaphorically circumnavigates this experience and is a personal meditation on her own process of reflection and interpretation. She predominantly works as an artist trying to collage the timeless world and poetically draw inherent correlations between the self and the various dimensions of the cultural diaphragm. Her current films include The Linear of Nightmare, Studies on Dualism, The Birth of BrainFly and Tentacles of Dimensions.
SALLY GRIZZELL LARSON is an independent visual artist. Screenings of her video works include 11° FILE (Electronic Language International Festival), São Paulo; Berlin International Directors Lounge; Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid; Alternative Film/Video Festival, Belgrade; Big Screen Project, New York;NewFilmmakers NY, Anthology Film Archives; and the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ Festival of Film and Media Arts. Her video CERTAIN WOMENwas awarded “Best of Festival–Experimental” at the Berkeley Video and Film Festival in 2006. AXIOM was awarded “Best in Category: The Medium is the Message” and Third Place overall at the Toronto Urban Film Festival in 2010. http://www.rhizome.org/profiles/sallygrizzelllarson/
MURIEL MONTINI
Studies cinema. Lives and works in Paris.
MARIA NIRO
Works with video, installation, photographyand sound. Her current body of work explores the poetics of memory and dreams analyzing their connections to the textures and rhythms of water, light, time and space. She creates original soundscapes usingfield recordings, found sound, and her own voice manipulated with software instruments. Niro’s latest web videos were commissioned by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and featured at www. WhiteLightFestival.com. Her work has screened in galleries and festivals throughout the world including the 10th Annual River to River Festival in New York, The 7th Berlin International Directors Lounge, European Media Arts Festival Germany, NOT A CAR at Los Angeles Art Organization, Festival of the New Latin American Cinema, CUBA, Video Dumbo New York, Counter Cultures, Counter Cinema at Exit Art Gallery New York, WNDX Winnipeg’s Film & Video Art Festival, CANADA, Whitechapel Gallery, UK and Millennium Film Workshop New York, among others. Some of Niro’s work is distributed by the New American Cinema Group/Filmmakers’ Cooperative. She is based in New York City.
KELLY OLIVER is a video artist who has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally in venues such as The New York Underground Film Festival, The Liverpool Biennial, Off-Loop Barcelona Video Art Festival, GloguaAIR Berlin, Carnegie Museum of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. She has collaborated with artist Keary Rosen on a number of video works exploring the conjunction of language and imagery.
CHARMAINE ORTIZ
Born and raised in North Carolina. In 2003 she attended the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, where she earned Bachelor of Arts degrees in Painting and in Art History. Prior to her graduate studies she assisted illustrator and sculpting artist, Virgina Wright-Frierson, in building the Airlie Gardens Minnie Evans Bottle Chapel. Savannah College of Art and Design has recognized her creative passion by awarding her the Combined Honors Fellowship to facilitate her completion of dual graduate degrees in Art History (MA) and Painting (MFA).
LILIANA RESNICK explores tensions between the inner world of human beings and the exterior world that encloses them. She works in narrative, documentary and experimental style and often mixes them all. She studied film in San Francisco and she holds a Master of Fine Arts in Cinema from San Francisco State University (she completed the program in December 2004.) Prior to that, Liliana studied gymnastics until age 14. She entered the dance world in order to improve her mime movement while at the same time studying philosophy and comparative literature at the University of Zagreb in Croatia. After graduating, she started to work as a choreographer which brought her a research scholarship upon which she spent two years in Beijing, studying movement in Peking Opera performances at the Academy of Chinese Traditional Theater, and Taijiquan. Beside choreographing and filmmaking, Liliana also writes on the topics of film, dance and art. Her writings have been published by many magazines and newspapers including Croatia’s Vijenac and Arkzin, and Germany’s Ballet/Tanz.. Liliana’s film work has become central in her search through different forms of expression. The short form gives her a freedom and convenience to explore many different styles while experimenting with themes and visuals. A feature length form gives her a possibility to reveal the complexity of the world we live in through exploration of narrative. http://www.cyclofilm.com
CHARLOTTE PRYCE
Charlotte Pryce has been making films and optical objects since 1986 and her works have screened throughout the world. She has taught experimental film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Academy of Art (San Francisco), Kent Institute of Design (Canterbury, England), and is currently a faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts (Los Angeles). She is a graduate of the Slade School of Art, University College London (BFA) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA).
AMY RUHL is a filmmaker reluctantly working from Bushwick, New York. Heretofore, her work has had a fascination with subversive ruptures in social history, mapping a visual language for female and queer desire on screen, and the depiction of sexual slapstick.
Unable to choose between being a “visual artist” or a narrative filmmaker, her newest obsessions lead her to both the writing of a feature length script, and separately, a new body of installation work expanding upon themes found in Victorian literature such as bodice-ripping Byronic heroes, eroticism in death, protracted sexual tension as class conflict, and the female dominated genre of “The Supernatural Explained.” Consequently, she watches a lot of Masterpiece Theater.
MERCEDES SADER is a filmmaker and cultural manager currently living and working in Punta del Este, Uruguay. Her experimental films are influenced by and are the consequence of her election: she choose to live and work in a country that experimental cinema represents a real possibility to film. She is inspired by the circumstances of her own life. In order to promote experimental cinema she is part of a group of artists that organize an annual experimental film festival and also coordinates workshops and seminars –free of any charge- about script, photography, filming with 16mm cameras, etc. in her city, a little town by the beach.
LYNNE SACHS makes films, videos, installations and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design. Since 1994, her five essay films have taken her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel and Germany — sites affected by international war–where she tries to work in the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, Lynne searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with each and every new project. Since 2006, she has collaborated with her partner Mark Street in a series of playful, mixed-media performance collaborations they call The XY Chromosome Project. In addition to her work with the moving image, Lynne co-edited the 2009 Millennium Film Journal issue on “Experiments in Documentary”. Supported by fellowships from the Rockefeller and Jerome Foundations and the New York State Council on the Arts, Lynne’s films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival and recently in a five film survey at the Buenos Aires Film Festival. In 2010, the San Francisco Cinematheque published a monograph with four original essays in conjunction with a full retrospective of Lynne’s work. Lynne teaches experimental film and video at New York University and lives in Brooklyn. www.lynnesachs.com
CINZIA SARTO was born in Italy, holds a bachelors degree in Architecture from the Cooper Union University of New York. Although she has worked for many years as an architect she is now more involved with visual experimentation from documentary to video-art and theater video-set. Her visual research focuses primarily on the experience of human bodies within the landscape they choose to inhabit. Her documentary “Femmina per Grazia Ricevuta” (co-directed with Lina Cascella) was awarded fist price at Campania Spot Festival (2006), her more experimental work “Una Sporca Vacanza” won the Video art first price at DigiFestival.Net ’07 and also at Tam Tam Digifestival ’07. Her work has screened at Anthology Film Archive (U.S.A.), Videoholica 2011(Bulgaria), Vox Feminae Film Festival 2010(Croatia), Transverse VT 2 International Digital Art IDAproject (Australia/Japan/China), Museo de Arte Moderno de Cartagena (Colombia), Halles S. Gery (Bruxelles), Douz and Mille Gallery (U.S.A.), product-Festival of Contemporary Art 2008 (Bulgaria), Arcipelago Bit Aly (Italy), Utsikten Kunstsenter Center (Norway), Mark De Puechredon Gallery (Switzerland), 10m2 Gallery (Bosnia-Erzegovina), V/07 Venice Art Fair, Ardeo Trani Film Festival 2011 & 2007 (Italy), Choachella Music and Art Festival 2007(U.S.A.), Art Basel Miami 2006, Ela-Asia Art Taipei 2006 (Taiwan), Museo d’Arte della Citta’ di Ravenna, Malafemmina Video Film Festival(U.S.A.) http://vimeo.com/24309235
YANA SAKELLION
As a designer and an artist Yana works across mediums including graphic design, interactive media, and video. Her practice emphasizes interdisciplinary approach to a conceptual inquiry, with special interest in storytelling. Yana was born to a mixed Russian-Greek family and grew up in Uzbekistan, Former Soviet Union. She often takes inspiration in the memories of her upbringing and migratory experiences. She also traveled excessively between the Former Soviet Republics, Europe and the US, and is fluent in Russian. Yana earned an honorary MFA degree from the Department of Digital + Media at the Rhode Island School of Design, and her work has been exhibited and published nationally and abroad, most recently at the Video and Contemporary Art Festival Waterpieces, Riga, Latvia and Oslo Screen Festival, Oslo, Norway. She is currently holding a tenure-track position on the faculty in the Graphic Design Department at the American University, Washington, DC.
REBECCA TIERNAN is Irish American, grown up between the States and England and has a lot of love for experimental film, video art and theatre. http://vimeo.com/user2449911
LILI WHITE Director / Organizer of AXWFF White made Super 8 films while studying painting and has often curated shows of experimental media and fine art works. When the computer transformed movie making at the end of the last century, she began using that technology. Her films’ form is that of atmospheric collage whose themes regard relationships of power and repression— connecting news issues to science facts, paralleling mythic to personal stories, and reference other art forms. Their idea evinces the “whole” of the subject: like how ALL the facets form A diamond. Her feature “NY(see)” premiered at Pioneer Theatre in 2006. “everything, BUT” won BEST FILM PROMOTING (agricultural) SUSTAINABILITY at 3 A Short Film Fest.
STEPHANIE WUERTZ is an audiovisual artist based in New York working in a wide range of media both appropriated and original. She is interested in the intersections between art, technology, and science. She has screened and performed live projections of her work at such venues as The New Museum, White Box Gallery, Microscope Gallery, CoExist Gallery, Issue Project Room, Cherry Kino Lab and Anthology Film Archives. She currently works in the department of Digital Media at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“BODILY HEAVENS” is the first in a series of works using microscopic imagery. The work is concerned with uncovering the repressed in vision and by authoritative discourse surrounding the body, working against the intended use, it luxuriates in the surface, texture, and tactile qualities of the material
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Courtney Fellion – AXWFF logo designer- is a curator, filmmaker, and graphic designer pursuing her Masters in Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University. After graduating from the University of Colorado’s experimental-focused film program, she was a participant in Sundance Film Institute’s Art House Project has worked with various film venues including the International Film Series in Boulder and festivals including the AURORA International Animation Festival in Norwich, England. She currently works with experimental film distributor Canyon Cinema in San Francisco. She is interested in exhibition and distribution formats, nostalgia for fictive/virtual places, and the hybridization and mythology of the American West.
www.losthorizoncreative.com <http://www.losthorizoncreative.com>
Mari Babao – Photographer for AXWFFestival and at other times a director, writer, producer. Mari is currently in New York City developing a feature-length documentary and contributing on production for shorts. Mari Babao has been making social issue documentary films for over ten years. Born and raised in multicultural Mindanao in Southern Philippines, her passion for producing social documentaries began during her career in broadcast journalism in which she won for her program KBP’s Golden Dove Award for “Best in Public Affairs Programming” in 2000. She then joined the government as a technical assistant of the Secretariat for the Government Panel of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) negotiating with the Muslim secessionist movement where she participated in crafting government positions for the Interim Peace Agreements on Ceasefire; Rehabilitation and Development; and the Draft Final Peace Agreement. Her recent credits include creating a national television program designed to support the National Peace Agenda of the government of the Republic of the Philippines. As Executive Producer, she produced, wrote and directed the weekly programming of live studio telecasts and short feature documentary episodes for almost two years. The program won Southeast Asian Foundation for Children and Television’s Anak TV Seal Award for responsible programming. She founded Green Circle Media Productions, Inc which produced a weekly television program and ran a nationwide public advocacy campaign contracted by The World Bank and USAID. This led her to produce more social issue documentaries on governance, conflict-prevention, peace building, human rights and multiculturalism. In addition to her work in making documentary films, Mari has co-convened a national youth movement in the Philippines empowering and energizing the youth for political participation.
