From: Beth Capper (email suppressed)
Date: Tue Nov 17 2009 - 13:10:00 PST
Eye & Ear Clinic/*Refracted Lens *Presents...
*Gender Trouble: The animations of Maria Lassnig & Martha Colburn*
Monday, November 30, 2009
6.00-8:00pm, FREE and Open to the Public
Flaxman Theater (room MC1307), 112 S. Michigan Ave
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
*For Immediate Release**
Contact: Beth Capper: email suppressed*
Refracted Lens, a new Chicago-based film series, pairs animators Maria
Lassnig and Martha Colburn in a co-presentation with the Eye & Ear Clinic.
Although Lassnig and Colburn's works are 30-years apart, they share many of
the same concerns. These are in part political, as both demonstrate an
engagement with feminism and gender politics, and the impact of culture in
informing men and womens' self-images, and partly in their creative
processes, as both artists are largely self-taught. Through their uniquely
offbeat approaches, Colburn and Lassnig bring something to the history of
handmade animation that cannot be learned in a classroom.
Maria Lassnig is a painter and animator who made most of her films in the
late '60s and early '70s. Her work employs a more direct register,
exploring the
friction between feminist politics and the desire for a romantic
relationship (the personal and the political) and experimenting with bodily
abstraction through a feminist lens concurrent with the time. Maya
McKeachneay writes, "[Lassnig's] unconventional films, made with stencil,
watercolors or felt-tip pen; her blue-box performances, vocal numbers and
split-screen experiments show even more clearly than her painting, the
Carinthian artist’s sense of humor and enjoyment of experimentation."
Lassnig's animations are unpretentious, and at times unabashedly
sentimental; they are wry and hilarious. Although her work has received more
attention in recent years in the USA, her film work is still relatively
obscure. This is the first time Lassnig's animations will screen in Chicago.
Martha Colburn's work is equally feminist, but more complex, fusing
scathing political critique and pop cultural assemblage with humorous and
terrifying explosions of gender binaries, through live action
(paint-on-glass) animations, found footage and documentary filmmaking
techniques. Her films fuse incendiary classical scores and frenetic editing;
they are disorientating--a battlefield strewn with the bloody fragments of
received history and ideology. Jonas Mekas writes, "bordering on the
outrageous, crackling frame energy, Martha Colburn's films are naked
testimonials of our times, and of her generation."
*Bio - Maria Lassnig*
Maria Lassnig´s films portray only an excerpt of her artistic talent. Even
so, her effect as an inspiring force for Austrian animated and avant-garde
film should not be underestimated. She founded the Studio for Experimental
Animation in 1982, while she was a professor at the University for Applied
Arts Vienna (1980-1997). Except for a course in Animation at the School of
Visual Art New York, Maria Lassnig used only her self-taught abilities. Her
films came not from the animation stand, but from her self-designed
worktable, most of which had developed after so-called
"Body-Awareness-Drawings". As co-founder of informal painting with Arnulf
Rainer and founder of body-painting, her films are immersed in the context
of fine art. Commenting on the motivation to make films, she said "The world
and the people in their comic-tragic confusion, prejudices, and
superstitions gave me plenty of material, to point my finger at.
Imperfection and pain can be overcome with humor.(...) To write articles,
dialogues, and songs as a painter was a big adventure, but it also awakened
my conscience and a feeling of responsibility, if not before the film, then
in any case afterwards." (Index)
*Bio - Martha Colburn*
Born in Pennsylvania (1971), Martha Colburn is an artist filmmaker based in
New York. She travels extensively exhibiting and lecturing on her work. She
has a B.A. from Maryland Institute College of Art and MA equivalent from
Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunst (Royal Academy of Art) in Holland. A
self-taught filmmaker, she began in 1994 with found footage and Super 8
cameras and has since completed over 40 films. She also selects elements
from her films and using slide projections and murals to create
installations. Ms. Colburn has taught workshops on her animation technique
in China, Europe, Canada, and all parts of America. She has made music
videos/ music-art films for bands such as Deerhoof, Serj Tankian, They Might
Be Giants and the documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnson. In the 2007
Sundance Film Festival she was invited to initiate the New Frontiers film
and video installation program, with Meet Me in Wichita. Her work will also
be exhibited in Centre Pompidou in Paris, Pallant House (UK) and at Galerie
Anne De Villepoix in Paris in 2007. She exhibits with Galerie Diana Stigter
in Holland.
Works:
*Maria Lassnig*
Chairs (2m, 1971, color, 16mm
Shapes (10m, 1972, color, 16mm)
Palmistry (10m, 1973, color, 16mm
Couples (10m, 1972, color, 16mm
Selfportrait (5m, 1971, color, 16mm)
*Martha Colburn*
Waschdrang Mama (3.30m, 2006, color, 16mm)
Meet Me in Wichita (7m, 2006, color, 16mm)
Electric Literature (6m, 2008, color, 16mm)
Cosmetic Emergency (8m, 2005, color, Mini DV)
Triumph of the Wild (12m, 2008, color, 16mm)
Secrets of Mexuality (5m, 2003, color, 16mm)
*Refracted Lens** is a film series committed to exhibiting cutting-edge and
underrepresented film, video, and new media work. Refracted Lens is
organized by Beth Capper and Kelly Shindler
*
*The Eye & Ear Clinic** is a free bi-weekly film series run by SAIC graduate
students in Film, Video and New Media; Art History, Theory, and Criticism;
and Arts Administration and Policy. * *Contact us at
email suppressed and be our friend on Facebook!*
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.