The Third Thing is a performative collaboration between Bay Area poets Ivy Johnson and Kate Robinson. They deploy still and moving images, live performance, and poetry to create multi-media collages in the service of an ecstatic feminist agenda.
SAT 5/13
WED 4/26
Romance, Apocalypse and Moon Landings: Kate McCabe + Gabriela Molina
(filmmakers in person)
Kate McCabe will be showcasing a decade’s worth of her moving image work combining humor in experimental film and premiering her latest 16mm work, You and I Remain. A film inspired by the Anthropocene, You and I Remain is an apocalyptic lullaby, a landscape film mediating on the end of the world. Shot in Big Sur, the Salton Sea and in McCabe’s own neighborhood of Joshua Tree, the film shows us a portrait of the world askew with subtle and moving sound design by Jason Payne of Nitzer Ebb. Local fave, Gabriela Molina begins the evening with a selection of her recent fantastical cut-out animations and light experiments!
WED 4/26
Romance, Apocalypse and Moon Landings: Kate McCabe + Gabriella Molina
(filmmakers in person)
Kate McCabe will be showcasing a decade’s worth of her moving image work combining humor in experimental film and premiering her latest 16mm work, You and I Remain. A film inspired by the Anthropocene, You and I Remain is an apocalyptic lullaby, a landscape film mediating on the end of the world. Shot in Big Sur, the Salton Sea and in McCabe’s own neighborhood of Joshua Tree, the film shows us a portrait of the world askew with subtle and moving sound design by Jason Payne of Nitzer Ebb. Local fave, Gabriella Molina begins the evening with a selection of her recent fantastical cut-out animations and light experiments!
WED 4/12
Patrick McGuinn’s Desert Rock Opera Valpurnis:SATurAN and live POP music!
(Patrick McGuinn in person)
‘Valpurnis: SatURan’ (2017, 60 min. Color) Bellowing from the mind of creator Christ Opherstein, this surreal Desert Rock Opera (filmed in Tucson) hurls its politics and religion in your face along with the acid anger of those disenfranchised by society. Judas has sold Jesus to the Romans, and during the Last Supper, reflections of identity, guilt, entitlement and outrage, Judas’ ten songs take the audience hostage for a bumpy, blindfolded ride in the back of an open jeep. Gentle Jesus in various manifestations counters the rage with somber songs of resignation. Opening the filmed Opus is a pre-movie live 30 minute set of distinctly different pop songs, amounting to a highly unusual night of music assault. Brace yourself for the blood of Christ! Afterwards, join cast, crew & director for a Q&A
WED 3/29
Drunktown’s Finest (2014) w/ Director Sydney Freeland in person!!
(GIRL CRUSH SERIES)
Top off the month with this hard-hitting independent film about three young Navajos striving to escape hardship on the reservation: a young man whose life is entwined in gang violence, a young woman who was adopted by a white family as a child, and a two-spirit sex worker struggling to survive in a transphobic world. Director Sydney Freeland, herself a Navajo trans woman on the rise in Hollywood (see her beautiful 2016 web series Her Story), will be there in person for a Q&A.
WED 3/29
(GIRL CRUSH SERIES)
Top off the month with this hard-hitting independent film about three young Navajos striving to escape hardship on the reservation: a young man whose life is entwined in gang violence, a young woman who was adopted by a white family as a child, and a two-spirit sex worker struggling to survive in a transphobic world. Director Sydney Freeland, herself a Navajo trans woman on the rise in Hollywood (see her beautiful 2016 web series Her Story), will be there in person for a Q&A.
MON 3/13
PERFORMANCE // POETICS: Trudgeon & Shuta
(Performance // Poetics is a series of poetics implanted in performance and media art curated by Housten Donham.)
Tom Trudgeon is an artist and writer from the San Fernando Valley. His work quizzes the ways in which everyday experience brushes up against limitlessness, primarily via video and monologue.
Andrew Shuta co-runs Spork Press, a DIY publishing house, and Everybody, a new art gallery in Tucson. His radiant multi-media work is typically drenched in glossy intensities.
MON 3/13
PERFORMANCE // POETICS:
Trudgeon & Shuta
(Performance // Poetics is a series of poetics implanted in performance and media art curated by Housten Donham.)
Tom Trudgeon is an artist and writer from the San Fernando Valley. His work quizzes the ways in which everyday experience brushes up against limitlessness, primarily via video and monologue.
Andrew Shuta co-runs Spork Press, a DIY publishing house, and Everybody, a new art gallery in Tucson. His radiant multi-media work is typically drenched in glossy intensities.
DREAM CITIES & NON PLACES: Emma Piper-Burket & Cáit Ní Síomón
Emma Piper-Burket’s “Two years ago Diana was living on her own in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan’s buzzing capital city. She was studying to be a flight attendant and enjoying the freedom of being independent and young in a growing city. When ISIS and war returned to Iraq she moved back to her mother’s home in Sulaymaniyah. Now her days pass quietly, mostly indoors. In the darkness of frequent power outages, Diana builds a dream city in her mind.”
Cáit Ní Síomón essay films No News from Chicago is a silent narrative shot guerrilla style in McCormick Place, the largest convention center in North America. It is a document of four individuals trying to make sense of the highly codified and homogenous world of the “non-place,” when stripped bare of its function of commerce and trade.Beneath the Pavement’is a psychoanalytic study of the experience of nature within contemporary technological landscapes. The essay traces the history of an area in the south loop of Chicago from early settlement expansion to the last plot of undeveloped land within the city limits, nicknamed the “Brownlands.”
TUES 2/7
DREAM CITIES & NON PLACES: Emma Piper-Burket & Cáit Ní Síomón.
(Filmmakers in person)
Nomadic Videomaker Emma Piper-Burket joins us with her new film , a powerful personal documentary of crisis folding in contemporary Iraq. Piper-Burket writes, “Two years ago Diana was living on her own in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan’s buzzing capital city. She was studying to be a flight attendant and enjoying the freedom of being independent and young in a growing city. When ISIS and war returned to Iraq she moved back to her mother’s home in Sulaymaniyah. Now her days pass quietly, mostly indoors. In the darkness of frequent power outages, Diana builds a dream city in her mind.”
Opening the evening is Tucson’s diasporic Irish media artist Cáit Ní Síomón with two recent videos drawing from her years in Chicago. No News from Chicago is a silent narrative shot guerrilla style in McCormick Place, the largest convention center in North America. It is a document of four individuals trying to make sense of the highly codified and homogenous world of the “non-place,” when stripped bare of its function of commerce and trade. Beneath the Pavement is a psychoanalytic study of the experience of nature within contemporary technological landscapes. The essay traces the history of an area in the south loop of Chicago from early settlement expansion to the last plot of undeveloped land within the city limits, nicknamed the “Brownlands.”