Soft Epic review on artforum.com
[ read this review on artforum.com ]
In his 2003 documentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself, filmmaker, Cal Arts professor, and Los Angeles native Thom Andersen criticizes Hollywood cinema’s misrepresentation of the metropolis. The City of Angels, he argues, is rarely captured on film as is. The industry either splices LA into unrecognizability, converting the city into an anonymous backdrop, or denigrates it directly, at times even forcing the already much-maligned urban center to play the villain.
Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib’s ambitious video installation The Soft Epic or: Savages of the Pacific West, 2008, commits all of the filmic infractions Andersen so despises. Happily, however, the work sins in the service of critique. The Philadelphia-based duo’s five-projection panorama immerses viewers in a fiery, dystopian downtown littered with rubble and populated by wild beasts run amok. Collaged from multiple moving images, the space depicted is entirely fictional: As one scans the vista, gleaming skyscrapers give way to the charred remains of a Gothic cathedral. And yet, centered amid the carnage is a sign marking the junction of Eighth and Hill streets, an intersection in Los Angeles’s business district. Squarely casting the oft-tortured city in the role of Boschian hellscape, Hironaka and Suib create an environment so excessively apocalyptic it reads only as spectacle. In this Disneyland gone haywire, a security guard with the head of an owl stands mute, an unwitting sentinel as a lion roars from the flames of a burning sedan, a leopard and a woman mechanically perform copulation, and a human-headed pig leaps gleefully into the fray. Crows flap their wings as the sky rains debris on a miniature pope calming one of his hysterical devotees with conciliatory hugs. What sounds like breaking glass, crying animals, and discharging lasers remains faint and untraceable.
The intentional roughness of the imagery renders Hironaka and Suib’s fragmented cityscape thoroughly incredible. The edges of The Soft Epic’s visual patchwork are ragged; the colors in each of its projections have not been cleanly calibrated. Disjunctions between the work’s video and audio tracks reinforce its status as cinematic construction. Andersen might be proud. Here lies the myth of Los Angeles, laid bare.
— Sarah Kessler
By Sean Dockray | press, telic | No Comments »
Dinner Theater installation by Katie Byron
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These are Katie’s photographs on flickr. We’ll upload our own soon from the performances!
By Sean Dockray | food, installation | No Comments »
SMAQ to design our BERLIN gallery
After more than seven months of trying to secure the perfect location, we can announce that TELIC is starting a project in the Brunnenstraße gallery district. We are very excited and lucky to have a Berlin-based architecture, landscape, and urbanism office, named SMAQ (see Cozy Chair, above), designing the space for us. More news to come!
By Sean Dockray | Berlin, architecture, telic | No Comments »
People Watching series begins July 3rd at 8pm
People Watching is a monthly film-screening series with the goal of approaching movies for their anthropological significance, over their contribution to film history and academia. The title of each film will be a mystery until the night of the screening.
The inaugural session of People Watching will feature a classic Film Noir thriller about a serial killer. The aim of this screening is not to figure out “whodunnit”, but to ponder the notion that in 1931, in a city with a population of over 4,000,000, all its residents (though often working separately) might share the unified objective of apprehending a single criminal.
Thursday, July 3 at 8pm.
This is an outdoor screening, so dress appropriately!
Organized by Helen Cahng.
By Sean Dockray | pedagogy, screening | No Comments »
Conversations that Never Happened opening reception photos
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[ photos on flickr ]
By Sean Dockray | telic | No Comments »
Rhizome on Rachel Mayeri’s Primate Cinema
Quoted in its entirety from http://rhizome.org/editorial/fp/blog.php/855
Humans are capable of such funny contradictions. Take, for instance, our proclivity to forget that we, too, are animals, while nonetheless looking to other primates in an effort to further study ourselves. In a video series entitled “Primate Cinema,” Rachel Mayeri dives headfirst into this often comic dilemma. Three videos in this series are currently on view at Los Angeles’ TELIC Arts Exchange, and each takes the increasingly popular primate narrative genre as its starting point to build “an observation platform for viewing the social, sexual, and political behavior of human and nonhuman primates.” In Jane Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees we see a live performance of a classic nature documentary, developed and taped as the result of a three-week workshop at TELIC. The piece explores the documentary medium and the work it does to dramatize scenarios, despite its presumed objectivity. How to Act like an Animal also unfolded from a workshop–in this case co-led by primatologist Deborah Forster and theater director Alyssa Ravenwood. The tasks rehearsed speak to common perceptions of the primitivity of non-human animals, with the close study and re-interpretation of a nature documentary leading to the act of “hunting, killing, and sharing the meat of a colobus monkey.” An earlier video in the series, Baboons as Friends, reaches beyond the model of pure consumption and survival to explore the emotional and social lives of primates. Shot with human actors in a film noir style, the piece explores the ways in which “lust, jealousy, sex, and violence transpir[e] simultaneously in human and nonhuman worlds.” While entertaining, the videos also taxonomize and observe the field of primate studies as a model of inquiry and a classic medium of scientific thought. If anything, Mayeri’s work takes a compelling look at the evolution of a field crafted to study our own evolution.
- Marisa Olson
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Gravity Art review in the LA Weekly
Quoted in its entirety from:
http://www.laweekly.com/art+books/art/art-around-town/18665/
The genesis of “Gravity Art,” the new show at Telic Arts Exchange, was curator Rene Daalder’s documentary-film project on Duch/Californian artist Bas Jan Ader. Before disappearing in 1975 while attempting to cross the Atlantic in a tiny sailboat, Ader created a body of work often dealing with human failings, weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and, with almost slapstick appeal, our susceptibility to gravity. With such inspiration, Daalder assembled (for Amsterdam’s de Appel Arts Centre) an exhibition of films and photographs by multiple artists interested in variously harnessing, defying and giving in to the force of gravity. Hoping to draw a closer correlation, and create more of a cacophony, Daalder tries again here, with an exhibition designed by architect Jens Hommert that allows visitors to hear the soundtracks of 30 films and video works simultaneously, and to watch any one of them with at least a handful more in the periphery. Such curatorial reaching often results in a reauthoring of artworks that is irritating, both in what seems a violation of the originals and in that the curator’s attempt to play artist is usually less interesting. Daalder and Hommert nonetheless succeed as artists, authoring a new work that brilliantly appropriates all the others. They also succeed as curator and designer, delivering an exhibition that, though muddling, crystallizes the spirit of included works by an impressive list of new-realist, actionist and postminimalist artists and their descendants. It’s also an engaging study of the gravitational heroics, humor and tragedy known to anyone who has ever gotten out of bed or fallen on the floor. Telic Arts Exchange, 975 Chung King Road, L.A.; Fri.-Sat., noon-6 p.m.; thru April 26. (213) 344-6137 or 2003-2008.telic.info.
- Christopher Miles
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Gravity Art events
There are three consecutive Saturdays of events in conjunction with the Gravity Art exhibition:
April 12
6pm: Willem de Ridder [ more info ]
then: Here is Always Somewhere Else screening [ more info ]
April 19
3pm: Conceptual Time Based Art symposium at UCLA [ more info ]
April 26
6pm: Erik Wesselo [ more info ]
then: Here is Always Somewhere Else screening [ more info ]
By Sean Dockray | lecture, screening, telic | No Comments »
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