Saturday, February 23, 2013
New Works Salon IX
Echo Park Film Center

Chloe Reyes
Aviary (2013)
6 minutes, un-slit 8mm, b&w, silent.

A look at Maxine Olson’s canaries.

Brigid McCaffrey
Innisfree (2013)
34 minutes, video, sound.

A geologist traces a range of formations within the Mojave Desert, considering a full retreat into remoteness and the company of the rocks. Brigid McCaffrey makes films about subjects who appear to be mis/displaced in the world and the shifting regions they encounter. Featuring Sikhs in the California desert, young female truck drivers on the American interstate, and nuns as riverboat captains, her films have screened in Rotterdam, Portland, Los Angeles, Lisbon, Ann Arbor, and elsewhere.

Valerie Soe
The Chinese Gardens (2012)
17 minutes, video, sound.

The Chinese Gardens looks at the lost Chinese community in Port Townsend, WA, examining racism against the Chinese in the Pacific Northwest in the late 1800s, from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 through various lynchings, beatings, and murders, drawing connections between past and present race relations in the U.S. Valerie Soe is a San Francisco writer, educator, and artist. Her experimental videos and installations, which look at gender and cultural identity and anti-racism struggles, have exhibited at venues such as the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles the Museum of Modern Art and the New Museum in New York City, and at film festivals worldwide.