Saturday, April 26, 2014
Echo Park Film Center
New Works Salon XX

This program is supported in part by grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts & the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Janis Crystal Lipzin
De Luce 2: Architectura (2013) Super 8 on video, 8.5 min., color, sound.
Light and photo-chemistry collide and conspire against different architectural backdrops, suspending and dissolving celluloid matter into a luminosity reminiscent of Mark Rothko’s radiant field paintings. The original super-8mm film was shot in Paris, Norway, Toronto, Wyoming, Colorado, Chicago, Cincinnati, Napa Valley & southern and northern California between 1983 and 2012, and then painstakingly hand-processed. This is the second film in the artist’s “De Luce” (On Light) series that was inspired by this medieval text: “In the beginning of time, light drew out matter, along with itself, into a mass as great as the fabric of the world. –Robert Grosseteste (1170–1253).

Kerry Laitala
Conjuror’s Box
(2012) 35mm on digital, 6 min.
Through the looking glass one travels and becomes immersed in a fiery pane of hand-painted wonders. Conjuror’s Box summons forth primordial images of beauty from the hand painted imagery to images of transformation, metamorphosis, and chimera to literary and even ancient, biblical references. The fiery hole becomes a mirror of past and future deaths. “Mene mene tekel puharsin” (“The hand writing on the wall”) is written on one of the magic lantern slides. I used this idiomatic expression as a portent alluding to the demise of 35mm film. As Conjuror’s Box was made and finished on celluloid material, this small section of the film is a harbinger of doom for the flickering material. When I started this film in 2006 and shot the slide, it was less apparent that the loss of celluloid would occur quite as rapid as time has proven that it would occur.

Kerry Laitala
Velvet of Night
(2012) 16mm with looper, 12 min., expanded cinema performance, sound by John Davis.
An ode to Carl Sagan, this work is comprised of a series of interventions that bring a telescopic view of the planetarium to the surface of celluloid. An Aurora Borealis fans its luminous waves on the screen as constellations emerge from the chaos.

—Intermission—

Ross Meckfessel
Invocation of Uzi
(2014) Super 8, 5 min., color, silent.
An abstracted portrait of actress Jojo Hill as she portrays five different characters in this behind-the-scenes documentary of Uzi’s Party: an experimental pagan teen drama by Lyra Hill.

Zach Iannazzi
California Picture Book
(2013) 16mm, 12.5 min., color & b/w, silent

Zach Iannazzi
Untitled (Work-in-Progress)
(2014) 16mm, 15 min., b/w, silent

Paul Clipson
Transparent Things
(2014) Super 8, 7.5 min, b/w & color, music by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
A crisscross journey along riverbeds, through forest floors and over terrains of either a few inches or many miles, minutes or centuries. Commissioned by Echo Park Film Center.