Day 1 > Sarah Lasley

Welcome to the Enclave
4K video animation
12 minutes
2023

“Welcome to the Enclave” is an experimental animation framed as an absurdist crowdfunding video. The Enclave is a virtual neighborhood for ‘like-minded women’ created by Moni Calivione during the Covid pandemic. At the moment, she’s under attack from Reddit trolls who are changing her road signs to potty humor and splattering her walls with sexually explicit imagery. Together with her sister Blair, she desperately looks for a way to save her patch of e-serenity by raising money online. The film is a delirious exploration of technological “progress” that paints the metaverse as one large opportunity for chaos. A compendium of design flaws, errors, glitches, and oddities unravel the delusion at the heart of The Enclave’s pursuit for a white, suburban ideal and expose the baggage we bring to online spaces if we don’t fix our very real IRL problems.

There is a parallel between how a culture values women and how it values nature. Cast as a long-time supporting actress, backdrop, and accessory to man’s narrative of exploration and conquest, Nature has been categorized, contained, pruned and groomed to satisfy aesthetic cravings and support an American mythology. Categorization is never neutral and is defined to cater to the categorizer. My work connects the colonial gaze upon a landscape to the patriarchal control over female-identifying bodies and looks at how fantasy, simulation, and alter-cenes support both the processing and avoidance of difficult realities.

Through the rise and fall of visual verisimilitude in my highly-composited images, I aim to expose cracks and pathways in and out of our current socio-political moment. The myth of American exceptionalism hinges on the exploitation of the continent’s natural resources, disenfranchising of its native inhabitants, and the use of enslaved people as capital. White women both benefit from and are oppressed by these mythologies. It’s our responsibility to confront and dismantle whiteness in effort to be better allies, yet whiteness is slippery. Defined not by what it is but by what it is not – the racialized other – it hinges on the other to exist while simultaneously erasing the other from existence. A double-bind is also present in gender expectations and biases, and these conundrums of power pervade my work. How to hear the voice of the dominated in the archive of the dominant? How to resist objectification while working within the objectified frame?

In response, my films adopt a more feminine film form, valuing non-linear, sensorial experience over conventional, dialogue-driven narrative, and I use individual subjectivity to illuminate broader social issues. While my projects are conceptually rigorous, my filming process is highly intuitive and collaborative. I shoot alone with my subjects, without crew or assistants. Through this intimate working method, I create trust, openness, and equal partnership with the performers in my work. The camera follows their improvised performances, and we find the film together by framing and reframing this spontaneous action. I also make solo films, which are a collaboration between only the camera and me. The intimacy of these on-set collaborations persist even as I weave a structure into the film through the editing and visual effects. Green screen compositing allows for a final layer of collaboration in which isolated performers engage with simulated environments, triangulating the viewer, performer, and nature in intimate distance.

Sarah Lasley is a video artist from Louisville, Kentucky and an Assistant Professor of Film at Cal Poly Humboldt. Her current film “Welcome to the Enclave” premiered at Nitehawk Cinemas in Brooklyn this spring and recently screened at the Chicago Underground Film Festival, where it won an Honorable Mention prize, Cucalorus Film Festival, and in two pavilions at The Wrong Biennale. She was awarded the grand prize for Blue Star Contemporary’s Projection/Projektion video program in collaboration with Darmstädter Sezession in Germany, where she was an artist in residence in summer 2023. She holds an MFA from Yale School of Art and a BFA from University of Louisville and was a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2004.

www.sarahlasley.com

IG: @sarah_lasley

Day 2 > Ella Medicus

Agreements
digital video
9:16
2022

Written and recorded in Reykjavík, Iceland, 2022.

Sound design: Óskar Þór Arngrímsson

Agreements is written from the perspective of a photon and wave of light. If you were light itself, would you be able to see? Seeing only happens when light bounces off an object and into an eye. The light photons make agreements with the objects they will come in contact with, to meet at a point, and create an image for any eyes that might be nearby to witness. 

The text was written by myself in collaboration with a bodiless entity I refer to as the subconscious or the collective consciousness of humanity. Since learning a hypnosis technique in 2019, I have been speaking to the collective, asking it questions about the nature of reality. I was curious about light- how it experiences itself and how humans could put themselves into light’s shoes for a moment. 

Lyrics:

The first time I was ever created, I traveled forever
I have never experienced a single one of those moments 
until I found the friendly eye to bounce around inside of
and give an image
I have been everywhere 
And I am everywhere 
But I can’t feel myself move
Everything that has ever been seen is because of me
But I have seen nothing
I am never alone 
I am never lonely 
Because in between the times I say hello to my friends
I don’t experience time 
A point is in time
A point is a location
A mind is a location
A point is an observation made by a mind
A mind confirms its existence 
Observations are the basis of existence 
Observation
Observation
Existence
Location
Existence
I make agreements with the atoms 
We will meet at a point
My journey is without duration
My journey lasts an eternity
I experience every moment at once
I have never experienced anything like this before

Ella Medicus’ approach to making is based in the opinion that artists exist in the liminal outskirts of society; always contemplating and reflecting on what they observe. She is primarily interested in exposing the human body as a tool or lens of perception, finding the imperfections of its functionality and comparing observations from multiple schools of thought. In 2019 she became a certified hypnotist, which developed into a practice with her collaborator, where she speaks through his vessel to the the collective subconscious of humanity. She ask it questions about physics, mythology, spirits, angels, the beginning of creation, time- many aspects of the reality. She compares the information from this being to current reports from scientists, theorists, and physicists, fueling her writing and projects. 

Ella Medicus is a visual artist and hypnotist currently living and working in Ohio. She graduated with a BFA from Alfred University in 2015, where she focused in sculpture, video, and expanded media. Since graduating she co-ran a warehouse studio and gallery in Cleveland, traveled for residencies, and continued to make work. In recent years her videos have become more lyrical, and she has made several video projections for live performances.

ellamedicus.com 

@ellamedicus (ig)

Day 3 > Lin Li

You cannot remember your mother’s voice

Originally from Hong Kong and now settled in Scotland, Lin Li uses
mainly moving image and sound in her creative practice. Her
works explore such themes as the concept of peace, political
resistance, and transience as an existential essence.
Using the folding of origami objects learned in childhood as a
poetic device, You cannot remember your mother’s voice is a
reflection on, and the letting go of, the emotions around a mother’s
voice that can no longer be heard.

linli-art.com

Day 4 > Maria Molteni & Ash Capachione

Triskele & The Monster’s Tools: A Solstice Invocation of Medusa Consciousness
6 minute short film
2023

Video, digital animation, original sound (by Ash Capachione), public ritual (collaboration between Maria Molteni, Vin Caponigro and Laura Campagna), hand painted ground work (by Maria Molteni)

This experimental video artwork/ short film features a collaborative ritual performed atop Molteni’s public artwork “Gateway to Infinity (An Anti-monument)” complete with original sound and animation by multimedia artist Ash Capachione.

On the Summer Solstice, Maria Molteni and non-binary Italian American collaborators Vin Caponigro, Laura Campagna, Ash Capachione welcomed visitors to a public ritual upon the newly finished painted artwork, a spiraling labyrinth representing non-dual, cyclical expansion. Three Gorgons (Molteni, Caponigro, and Ganci), united by a lunar Priestess (Campagna), journey to the center, an Anti-monument, to invoke the spirit of Medusa Consciousness and the emerging awareness that recent reflections on her myth have reawakened.

Guests were invited to participate via printed paper talismans, a collective movement ritual, and personal family heirlooms (physical or conceptualized). Together they called upon the beaming sun, salty ocean, and three conjunction planetary bodies – the Moon, Venus, and Mars – to aid in a regenerative alchemical process. On this longest day, our inherited artifacts transformed via frameworks of “The Master’s Tools” (an influential concept of Audre Lorde) into the “Monster’s Tools” (offered by thinkers such as Ece Canli). By the fire of the Summer Solstice, we forged new tools and paths for the future from the melted refuse of the Masters’ instrumentation. Centering reclaimed narratives of Monsterized, Othered beings, we wish to restore connections of the mind and heart, land and sea. Our aim is to welcome a fully embodied Medusa into the space left vacant by the heartless, beheaded Boston Christopher Columbus monument.

Learn more about Gateway to Infinity and its accompanying publication “Medusa ~ Myth, Memory, Anti-Monument” here: mariamolteni.com/gateway-to-infinity-an-antimonument

Maria Molteni (they/them, b. 1983 Nashville, TN) is a queer interdisciplinary artist, mystic, organizer and educator based in Boston since 2002. Formally trained in painting, printmaking and dance, their practice has expanded to incorporate research, social magic, ritual performance, and play-based collaboration. Molteni works in a variety of media–from inflatable textile to found-object sculpture, painting to publication, movement to video. They choose media per its ability to intersect conceptual rigor, formal poignancy and spiritual depth. Most known for their monumental, site-specific hand painted groundworks (often basketball courts), which they call altars to the sky, shape-shifting labyrinths and horizontal monuments, Molteni and their work make a bold contribution to national movements of embodied, accessible public art.

Molteni’s membership of the Boston Rowing Center ties into their work about Sirens, sea monsters and ocean/island lore, significantly anchoring 20 years of practice in Massachusetts. They have also participated in grassroots Boston initiatives including New Craft Artists in Action (Founder + Team Captain), Occupy Boston, Boston LGBTQIA Artist Alliance, Design Studio for Social Intervention, Common Field, Danza Organica ensemble, Midway Artist Studios.

Molteni has exhibited at numerous galleries and museums as well as basements, meadows, sidewalks and seascapes across the globe. More formal institutions include The Momentary Contemporary Art Museum (Bentonville, AK), MFA & ICA Boston (MA), Project Rowhouses (Houston, TX), Den Frei Contemporary Art Center (Copenhagen, Denmark), Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (MA), NGBK (Berlin), Fruitlands Museum (Harvard, MA), Museum of Design (Atlanta, GA), Conduit Gallery (Dallas, TX), Flower Head (LA, CA), Fuller Craft Museum (Brockton, MA), Fitchburg Art Museum (Fitchburg, MA), Space Gallery (Portland, ME), BAK (Utrecht, Netherlands), A Plus A (Venice, IT), SLOMA (CA). They have completed residencies at Canterbury Shaker Village (New Hampshire), Heima (Iceland), Haystack (Maine), Elsewhere (Greensboro, NC), Queer Sport Split (Croatia), Platteforum (Denver, CO), Facebook HQ, to name a few. In 2016 their NCAA artist collective (New Craft Artists in Action) was invited to present their work on Capitol Hill to the Congressional Makers and STEAM Caucuses. www.mariamolteni.com

Ash Capachione (they/them) aka HELIXHAND is a motion designer, filmmaker and audio visual artist. They began recording found sounds, noise and experimental electronic music in their hometown of Boston, MA after finding sonic influence in New England’s sacred and haunted spaces. Capachione explores themes of queer identity and vulnerability, and revisions spiritual connectivity, ritual and folklore via an audiovisual practice. They perform and improvise live with computer-based and hardware electronics, machine generated video and composite, animation and live action video.

Capachione’s works in motion design, sound and video have been performed and exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), the Museum of Science and Technology (Boston), Anthony Greaney Contemporary Art Gallery (Boston), Museum of Museums (Seattle), SEASON Gallery (Seattle), San Diego Art Institute (San Diego), A Ship In the Woods (San Diego), SXSW, Decibel Fest, and Discwoman Fest.

www.helixhand.com

Vin Caponigro (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist who blends accessible and egalitarian concepts with ritual and performance to explore ideas of restriction and reproduction through writing, performance, and the creation of multiples. Caponigro’s research includes how those in power have used storytelling and reproducible media to control history, and how marginalized communities have used independent publishing to tell their own stories and fight back against oppressive systems.

Before its dissolution in 2017, Caponigro was a founding member of the non-anonymous W.I.T.C.H. Chicago. Caponigro frequently facilitates workshops and speaks on panels, recently at Harvard University, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Emerson College, the University of Kentucky, Oberlin College, and NYU Florence. They have facilitated numerous participatory performances, recently at Spaceus: Harvard Square, the Cincinnati Art Book Fair, the Future in Minneapolis, and in Boston Common. Caponigro has attended residencies in Estonia, Sicily, and the United States, including Zygote Press, ACRE, the Wassaic Project, and the Women’s Studio Workshop. In addition to solo exhibitions in Chicago and Baltimore, Caponigro’s work has been included in two-person and group exhibitions at the Chicago Cultural Center, Beverly Art Center, the Highland Park Art Center, the Chicago Artist Coalition, and the Nemeth Art Center.

Caponigro currently lives and works on occupied Massachusett and Wampanoag land, where they operate Snake Hair, an independent publisher of zines and ritual multiples.

www.vincaponigro.com

Laura Campagna is a healer, artist, and educator who has been reading tarot and studying astrology since she was 13 years old. Her readings are intuitively crafted for each individual and informed by feminist interpretations of ancient mythology.

Born and raised in Boston, MA. Laura is a Reiki Master and is trained in a number of powerful energetic healing modalities including VortexHealing® Divine Magic Energy in the Merlin Lineage. She is a Steering Committee member of the Association for Astrological Networking (AFAN), and co-chair of the Education Committee. Laura is the co-creator of Pagan Baby: A Kids Guide to the Cosmos with artist Catherine Please.

Laura holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College where she taught in the First Year Writing Program. She received her BA in Gender Studies from Antioch College where she studied the effects of the witch burnings on the modern day pagan community in Europe. She worked in social justice advocacy for many years, and taught Cultural Studies at Prescott College in Arizona, before devoting herself full time to healing and magic. Laura has presented on intersectional feminism, astrology, and witchcraft at Arizona State University, Mt. Holyoke College, Northeastern University, and University of Wisconsin Eau Claire.

www.lauracampagnaastrology.com

@Helixhand @Strega_Maria @Vincaponigro @LauraCampagna

Day 5 > Nelson Fernandes

Motus: a body in motion. A stop-motion animation where conception, degradation
and regeneration cohabit in a unique way. A creation on a metal sheet using ethanol
as the raw material.

Nelson Fernandes -Director / Realizador
Nelson Fernandes -Writer / Guião
Nelson Fernandes -Producer / Produtor
Filipe Santareno Marques -Sound / Som
Nelson Fernandes -SoundProject / Som

Nelson Fernandes aka Zina Caramelo was born in Marvão (Portugal), 23 January
1979.

Since 2000, he has been developing his work in a series of fields such as video,
cinema of animation, photography, painting and illustration. Since 2002, he has
worked as co-director in animation cinema workshops with children and
youngsters from schools all over the country.

After eight years of intense activity and professional development, he has
decided to extend his knowledge taking the Integral Animation Techniques
course (2D, 3D, Stop-Motion) and a Stop-Motion Master in which it directed the
film: “El Castigo” (The Punishment). Since then, his compulsive creativity has
been continually challenged to pursue greatness, be it in directing animated
short films “Paths of Light”, “Nós” (US) and the recent “Motus”.

Day 6 > Caroline Turner

HINTERLAND
3D animated video
3 minutes and 37 seconds
2021

We are living through a massively formative era and our ability to understand the present is constructed both from our conception of history and the way we remember our past, but also from the way we imagine our future going forward. My practice is centered within this disturbance; at the crossroads of our past and future as a species wherein moments of incoherence can be mined for creative potential. Both the 3D animated video, HINTERLAND, as well as the accompanying physical installation explore various historical manifestations of architectural arches and gateways: from Neolithic dolmens, to ornate Baroque arches, and survivalistic remnants from a future-past – all congealing to create a speculative vision of the longtail effects of human history progressing toward collapse. A hinterland is typically thought of as the less-developed land next to a port, city, or coast, but it can also be understood as the limitations of one’s knowledge; that which is unexplored and ill-defined. In this work, I propose we conceive of the hinterland as a source of opportunity to develop new systems: to reimagine, to reorient, to build something new. I’m most inspired by the idea that if we created this world, then we can create a new one, too. HINTERLAND also parafictionally exists within a piece of speculative fiction called “Alphabet Retreat” that weaves the story of human history and the creation of language through the Alphabet Multinational Conglomerate Company’s corporate language and structure during a wellness retreat in the Mojave Desert. The story unpacks the idea of language as a distributed, decentralized code upon which all thoughts, meaning, and images can be expressed; and explores the idea that social organization is itself a hypertext protocol. From the Alphabet Retreat, “Gobekley can see it all perfectly below his astral body, still floating in calm observation. The Rosetta Stone is the key: as Egyptian hieroglyphs and demotic script fell out of fashion in the beginning of the last millennium, the documentation of an entire society was erased from human memory; its language unable to be discerned. Though much like the scribes of ancient Memphis offering a bridge between Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Ancient Greek, the Great Founders have offered a bridge between all systems, erasing any barrier to access the depths of humanity’s vast output.”

Caroline Turner-Anderson is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator currently based in Cincinnati, OH. Her work and research explore technology, deep time, and speculation about the near-future through a wide variety of media and materials. Her installations, 3D animated videos, and collaborative projects have been shown at numerous venues in the United States, as well as Norway, Argentina, Russia, and Germany. She received her MFA in Art and Technology from the University of Oregon in 2021 and is currently an Assistant Professor of New Media and Electronic Art at the University of Cincinnati College of DAAP.

https://crlntrnr.net/
https://www.instagram.com/crlntrnr/

Day 7 > Marcos Serafim

Autoimmune
digital video, 12:25 minutes
2020

A non-human entity complicates common understandings of queerness, HIV/AIDS and the legacy of the pre antiretroviral crisis. With agency over data, it distorts images from archives and makes them speak. Composed with machine learning processes for generative video and sound, including deepfakes, the piece explores uncanny relations between technology, politics, and illness.

Marcos Serafim is a Brazilian artist exploring the extremes of digital imaging, video and sound across theatrical exhibition, installation, and performance. His practice investigates cultural, historical, and material relations between technology and minoritized social and political subjects. Serafim is Assistant Professor of Photography, Video, and Imaging at the University of Arizona’s School of Art. He has exhibited work at the 5th and 6th Ghetto Bienalle in Haiti; the Oscar Niemeyer Museum in Brazil; the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), the Queens Museum, and Flux Factory in New York. His work has been screened in film festivals in multiple countries, including the Cine Esquema Novo Film Festival in Brazil (Audience Choice Second Best Short), Israel`s Horn Festival for Experimental Films (Jury’s Second Prize), Northampton Film Festival in Massachusetts (Jury’s Honorable Mention for Short Experimental) and Faito Doc Festival in Italy (Honorable Mention for Short Documentary). Serafim holds a BA in Film and Video from Parana State University in Brazil, an MA in Studio Art from Eastern Illinois University, and an MFA in Studio Art from Michigan State University.

ig @marcosjserafim
website https://serafimn.msu.domains/

Day 8 > Domenica Mediati

Biophobia
BioArt Animation
00:01:21
2023

Biophobia explores the beautiful and repulsive relationship between humans and nature through the imagined lens of a microscope. The Video animation and installation present a new way of looking at organisms, inviting us to reconsider and repair our connection with nature. The specimens and characters featured in the exhibition were collected and inspired by the woodlands, rivers, and bodies of water in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. By confronting narratives and fears of an unseen world, Biophobia aims to foster a deeper understanding and appreciation of the intricate web of life surrounding us.

Domenica Mediati is an emerging Intermedia Artist and a Sessional Instructor in the Faculty of Education and School of Creative Arts at the University of Windsor. Domenica works across painting, drawing, digital animation, and bioart practices, creating landscapes and characters that reflect and interrogate human and non-human narratives with an emphasis on microbiology. 

Over the past four years, she has been a lead team member at INCUBATOR Art Lab, where she serves as a creative and intellectual collaborator on INCUBATOR Art Lab community engagement events and leads educational outreach programming. Mediati completed her BFA at the University of Windsor (2015) and her MFA at Wayne State University (2018). She has presented her artworks at various venues in the Windsor/Detroit region, in Portugal and New Mexico, USA.  

Website and Socials

www.domenicamediati.com 
@dombuka (Instagram)

Day 9 > Sabrina Ratte

INFLORESCENCES
2023

Series of 4 videos and 4 sculptures A production of the New Now Festival Multimedia integration: Guillaume Arseneault Sounds: Roger Tellier Craig Inflorescences unfolds in an hypothetical future, where plants, mushrooms, and unfamiliar critters have undergone mutations to exist in symbiosis with electronic waste. Challenging the definition of life, this project explores the emergence of life forms from what we perceive as inert and forgotten remnants, which continue to evolve and foster new relationships with the ecosystem. Inflorescences portrays a world devoid of humans, yet its evolution is shaped by the remnants they left behind. As part of the project, four sculptures are crafted from electronic waste, incorporating screens and lights that evoke the entities depicted in the videos, offering a glimpse into the future of these discarded objects.

Inflorescences se déroule dans un futur hypothétique, où plantes, champignons et créatures inconnues auront mutées pour vivre en symbiose avec des déchets électroniques. Ce projet explore des formes de vies qui émergent de ce que l’on juge inerte, des rebuts oubliés qui continuent à évoluer et à engendrer de nouvelles relations avec l’écosystème. Inflorescences dresse le portrait d’un monde sans humains, mais dont l’évolution est façonnée par leurs vestiges. Les 4 sculptures qui complètent le projet sont créées à partir de déchets électroniques, où un écran et des lumières viennent suggérer les entités présentes dans les vidéos, une vision du futur de ces objets laissés pour compte.

Sabrina Ratté, a Canadian artist based in Montreal, explores the diverse forms of digital imagery. Her artistic practice encompasses a wide array of mediums, including analog video, 3D animation, photography, printmaking, sculpture, virtual reality, and installation. By continuously incorporating new techniques into her work, she delves into recurring themes that include the influence of architecture and the digital environment on our perception of the world, our relationship with the virtual aspects of existence, and the convergence of technology and nature. Her work has been exhibited in institutions such as the Laforet Museum in Tokyo, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the PHI Center in Montreal, the Chronus Art Center in Shanghai, and the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. She has presented solo exhibitions at Gaîté Lyrique in Paris and Arsenal Contemporary Art in Montreal and New York. Notably, her work is part of the collection at the Montreal Contemporary Art Museum. Ratté was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award in Canada in 2019 and went on to receive the award in 2020.

https://sabrinaratte.com/
https://www.instagram.com/sabrina_ratte/

Day 10 > Meredith Moore

My Favorite Object 
video, 4:54
2019

Meredith Moore is a Baltimore-based artist and filmmaker. Her moving image work pushes the boundaries of traditional filmmaking, often combining techniques that range outdated analog film technologies to complex digital effects. Her films have screened at Sundance Film Festival, SXSW, True/False Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Antimatter Film Festival, Baltimore Museum of Art, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Washington Project for the Arts, and The Walters Art Museum. She has been a Saul Zaentz Fellow, a recipient of The Andy Warhol Foundation’s Grit Fund, served as a juror for Athens International Film Festival, and a resident artist at Signal Culture. Along with her film work, Meredith has worked professionally in audiovisual archives and has taught in the Film & Video Department at MICA. Her VFX work can be found in numerous documentaries and music videos.

https://meredithmoore.info/

Day 11 > Alison Nguyen

https://www.alisonnguyen.com/

Day 12 > Jude Abu Zaineh

FORMations
Petri-dish samplings, agar, food, plants, soil
duration 00:05:40
2022-23

FORMations reflects the natural ecology of food and flora in the region. Sampling the earth, indigenous and collected plant species, and leftover foods, FORMations examines the constant evolution within an ever-shifting cultural and geographical landscape; the petri-dish environment makes visible the invisible by providing a medium of growth for the microbial and bacterial communities that naturally exist within food and our overall surroundings. This enclosed environment gives metaphorical and visual connections to the often ignored or erased narratives and the layered complexities of hybrid existences that many newcomer (human and nonhuman species) experience in their respective, evolving habitats. 

Jude Abu Zaineh is a Palestinian-Canadian interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and cultural worker. Her practice employs art, food, and technology to investigate meanings of culture, displacement, diaspora, and belonging. She examines ideals of home and community while working to develop aesthetics rooted in her childhood and upbringing in South-West Asia. Abu Zaineh is the recipient of the 2020 William and Meredith Saunderson Prizes for Emerging Artists, and was one of the first selected artists to participate in a collaborative residency with the Ontario Science Centre and MOCA Toronto (Canada). She has presented her work at numerous cultural institutions including Cultivamos Cultura, São Luis, Portugal; Museu de Arte, Arquitetura e Tecnologia, Lisbon, Portugal; Centro de Cultura Digital, Mexico City, Mexico; SVA, NYC, USA; Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, USA; Forest City Gallery, London, Canada; Art Gallery of Windsor, Canada; Centre Culturel Canadien, Paris, France; and Museum London, Canada. Her works are currently on view at the Museum of Glass, Washington, USA; and forthcoming at Light Matter Film Experimental Film & Media Art Festival, Alfred, USA; and 17 Days Video Series, Western Michigan University & Alfred State University, USA. Abu Zaineh’s works can also be found in the permanent collections of The Museum of Glass (USA), Art Windsor-Essex (Canada), The City of Windsor’s Public Art Commission (Canada), as well as private collections internationally.

Abu Zaineh received an MFA from the University of Windsor (Canada) and is currently a PhD Candidate in Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (NY, USA) as a RPI HASS Fellow and SSHRC Doctoral Fellow.

She maintains an active studio practice between upstate NY, USA and Windsor-Essex, Canada.

http://www.judeaz.com
@judeaz_

Day 13 > Vav Vavrek

planet _____: Signal Lost 
digitized Kodak 35mm cross-processed slide film (expired)
2 min 52 sec
2022

Vav Vavrek is a creator of things and a maker of sounds. Ze enjoys hardware and software synthesis of audio and video, making field recordings, and creating crazy sounds. Most of the time, Vav works on multimedia art projects, experimental films, sculptures, and interactive installations.  Vav builds weird instruments and creates software; as well as experiments with analog synthesis using old test equipment and other electronic waste. Vav’s films and artwork have shown around the world, with recent inclusions in festivals in the USA, Greece, Italy (Sicily), Spain, and India.

Vav Vavrek was born in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania and grew up in the shadows of the rusting smokestacks of Pittsburgh.  A slight brain malfunction caused zim to ride screaming into the wind on a faded steel horse until ze lost his voice in Phoenix, Arizona.  In 2011 Vav violently dug up zir roots and tried to cultivate a new existence in the smog belt of the increasingly misnamed city of angels.  The decade-long drought in California caused zim to cross the continent again in 2016.  Vav is now sharing zir artistic ailment at Alfred State College as an adjunct professor and technician for the Digital Media & Animation department. 

https://postcards.vavvavrek.com/
https://www.instagram.com/vav_vavrek/

Day 14 > Kalpana Subramanian

Incantation
screening format HD
source footage includes 16mm and analog video signal processing
8’38, 2021

Kalpana Subramanian is an artist-scholar-filmmaker whose current work explores questions of
materiality, embodiment and consciousness through transcultural and interdisciplinary frameworks. She draws from South Asian philosophy, art and culture as well as Western avant-garde traditions to articulate new modes of cinematic inquiry and expression. Her doctoral research at the Department of Media Study, University at Buffalo, introduces “Cinema of Breath,” as a novel framework for cinematic praxis.

Kalpana Subramanian is an artist-filmmaker and scholar from India, currently based in
Buffalo NY. Her films have been screened at festivals such as the Yamagata International
Documentary Film Festival, Flaherty NYC, Wavelengths (TIFF), Antimatter Media Arts Festival
and ULTRA Cinema MX among others. She has received honors including an Audience Award
at the Documentary Festival of History and Archeology (Italy, 2015), awards for Creative
Approach (2003) and Cinematography (2003, Montana CINE International Film Festival) and a
Jury’s special mention at the CMS Vatavaran Film Festival. Her doctoral research at the
Department of Media Study, State University of New York at Buffalo, articulates a new
framework of transcultural respiratory aesthetics called the Cinema of Breath. Her work has
been supported by grants from Fulbright (University of Colorado Boulder), the UK
Environmental Film Fellowship and the Humanities Institute at SUNY Buffalo.

http://www.kalpanasubramamian.com
Instagram: @kalpanasubramamian

Day 15 > Mona Gazala

Closeness to the Land
digital video (7:34)
2021

In 2020, the artist Mona Gazala purchased an acre of land in western Ohio, on which sits a disused one-room schoolhouse. This site allowed her to explore her complex relationship with “the land” as the daughter of displaced indigenous Palestinians. Here, she attempts to form a proxy bond with the earth, on ground that was stolen from the displaced indigenous Shawnee people. “Closeness to the Land” is video footage of hand-painted text signs that translate the word الأرض (ard) into six nuanced English synonyms, being displayed performatively in multiple locations to capture the now-invisible nature of indigenous culture in Ohio. These signs were installed on the artist’s Urbana, Ohio schoolhouse in early 2021.

Mona Gazala (she/her) is a Palestinian-American multidisciplinary artist living and working in western Ohio. She is the recipient of numerous grants from the Ohio Arts Council, Greater Columbus Arts Council, Franklinton Arts District, Puffin Foundation West, Ohio Alliance for Arts Education, Decapital, and the Hishmeh Foundation, to undertake creative work centered on community-building, social justice, and activism.

gazalaprojects.com
@monagazala @gazalaprojects

Day 16 > Wang Chen

Fractured Delights
HD video with sound
05min30second
2023

WANG Chen incorporates drawing, animation, sculpture, costumed performance, fabrication, sound engineering, and 3D game design. By layering these different mediums into a digital landscape, they use satire, fiction, and exaggeration to create all-consuming dreamscapes. Incorporating physical and digital processes within their work, they are interested in the fluid boundaries between reality/imagination and the intersection of identity, media, and digital technology that redefines how we perceive and navigate the concepts of belonging and space.

WANG Chen (b.1991) received a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University (2014) and an MFA in Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology (2018). WANG has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Fotografiska Museum in Stockholm, Sweden, Roswell Museum, New Mexico, Lauren Powell Project, Los Angeles, The Immigrant Artist Biennial, NYC, Alfred University, and Crosstown Art Center in Memphis.

WANG’s fellowships, awards, and residencies include New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellow (Interdisciplinary), MacDowell Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center, NARS Artist Foundation in Brooklyn, and Roswell Artist in Residency.

Website: www.wangchenstudio.com
Instagram: ohyo_chen

Day 17 > Allie Wist

Rock Eater
video
3:06
2023

Futility is at the heart of ecological crisis. This work started from a kind of coarse alienation we have come to recognize: the near-daily reminder of the gap between our individual actions and massive, unchecked ecological demise. The difference between what we can do, and what we can’t. The impossible distance looming between bodies in the Anthropocene, and the materials that scale up our impact on the planet. These materials include asphalt, concrete, toxins, and other waste, which accumulate in the earth’s crust to become future strata. They layer into the earth, which has to digest our inputs into deep time. 

In the video, the artist attempts to scale giant heaps of gravel used to produce asphalt at a facility in Troy, NY, but struggles to make headway. She then attempts to eat clay rocks (an impulse with a long lineage in human societies, but pathologized in Western society as an eating disorder known as “pica.”) Perhaps in eating rocks, the protagonist might learn to process landscapes with her body, as such landscapes have been digesting humanity’s own inputs. She senses the vulnerability of having to metabolize back the pollutants and toxic materials we have put into the earth. Taste and digestion may become a form of sensing which goes beyond simply “consuming,” and thus, is an alternative to extraction and degradation. In the words of scholar Iemanjá Brown, appetite is an “aesthetic procedure that includes a material desire for intimacy with the more-than-human.”

Allie E.S. Wist is an artist-scholar working on speculative sensory narratives related to environmental humanities, food, and Anthropocene studies. She is currently an interdisciplinary Arts PhD student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an adjunct at NYU. Her work includes edible and olfactory artifacts, as well as photography and video, which come together most often in multi-media installation works. Other formats, including performative dinners, radio shows, and texts, attempt to render challenging temporalities accessible. She has an MA in Food Studies from NYU, and her work and workshops have been exhibited by Honolulu Biennial, The Wellcome Collection, MIT, the Nobel Prize Museum, and Pioneer Works.

www.alliewist.com

@AESWIST