EXPLODED VIEW — ART microCINEMA MUSIC

SAT 4/22 Peripheries: Groundbreaking Border Video Works

(Artists in person)

A night of video and new media works examining the intersections between community and international borders through audio, video, animation, and virtual reality.

“Peripheries” features a group of five artists and journalists from diverse backgrounds, including works by Jason Aragón, Wesley Creigh, Conor Elliott Fitzgerald, Jennifer Hijazi, and Khaled Jarrar. All participating artists will be in attendance.

Admission to the exhibition is free but donations will be accepted to support the work of Mariposas Sin Fronteras, a Tucson-based organization that provides legal counsel and support to LGBTQ immigrant detainees.

https://explodedviewgallery.org/2017/04/18/1898/

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 4/5
TUCSON NOISE SYMPOSIUM: 8 (bits) of harsh + NOT BREATHING

A mashup night of harsh noise and primitive 8 bit (utopian) video games! Hacking into the evening is Tucson’s twisted techno treasure Matt Rios navigating hardware game glitches. The feature act is an epic re-appropriation of 1984’s Kings Quest videogame through the sonic noise of Eric Schlappi, Anthony Sanchez, David Sherman and the all-consuming noise progenitor magus NOT BREATHING (David Wright) and visuals by Falcotronik!!

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.

WED 3/22
Doris Wishman’s Double Agent 73

(GIRL CRUSH SERIES)

A beautiful American spy (played by the fabulous Chesty Morgan) can murder men by smothering them with her enormous breasts. This trashy 70s sexploitation film, directed by the legendary Doris Wishman, is a feminist cult classic. Enjoy Wishman’s bizarre experimental cinematography, far-out plot twists and wild 1970’s camp! With special opening performance by local queer trans* lesbian woman of color stripperformance artist Rambo Reza!

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.

WED 3/8
The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996)

(GIRL CRUSH SERIES is co-presented with The U of A’s School of Theatre, Film and Television; Women’s Resource Center; Student Affairs; Institute for LGBT Studies; Gender & Women Studies; Hanson Film Institute)

Start Women’s History Month off right by joining us for Cheryl Dunye’s brilliant and self-reflexive speculative documentary about her quest to find queer black women’s film history – it’s also, amazingly, the first Black-woman-directed film ever to receive a wide theatrical release.

WED 2/15
DOUBLE INVOCATION OF SODOM!! Pasolini’s Salo, 120 Days in Sodom w/ live sound by Jasper Avery + Luther Price’s Sodom

It’s been called nauseating, shocking, depraved, pornographic . . . it’s also a masterpiece! Tucson electronic muse Sunfucked accompanies the Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final film, Salò. Set in 1944 Fascist Italy, this transposition of the Marquis de Sade’s eighteenth-century opus of torture and degradation in 1944’s fascist Italy remains one of the most passionately debated films of all time, a thought-provoking inquiry into the political, social, and sexual dynamics that define the world we live in. Opening the show is Luther Price’s 15 minute Super-8 masterpiece Sodom (1989), a brutal assemblage of gay porn footage, dumpster dived from behind buildings in Boston’s Combat Zone. Not only does Price mash up scenes of hardcore sex with footage from biblical films and shots of flames, he also punches holes in the film strip, taping shots of heads or penises back into them and drawing more attention to the surface, the materiality of the film itself. As film critic J. Hoberman put it succinctly, Sodom “could be the illumination of Jerry Falwell’s unconscious.”

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.”

Friday 1/27
Valerie Kuehne & the Wasps Nests / Vicki Brown / Algae&Tentacles

Valerie Kuehne and the Wasps Nests is a band based in New York and Pittsburgh. Valerie leads the group on vocals and cello, Jeffrey Young plays violin, and Alex Cohen plays drums. In performance, they mix grindcore, cabaret, performance art, punk, and neoclassical art song, with a dash of free improvisation. Lucid Culture said that Valerie Kuehne is “part punk classical cellist, part performance artist, but her performance art isn’t the foofy, mannered kind – it’s old school 80s style and it has fangs. And it’s hilarious.” Shakefist Magazine called her “a fearless cello master with a relentlessly creative soul.” Her work in this project and others operates under principles of surprise and investigates obsession, comedy, decay, forensic pathology, sex, hypnogogia, viscera, spirituality, and death.

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