CARL LEE 

CARL LEE 

TELESCOPE HOUSE (1 & 2)

(wood, camera, monitors, media players, glass, audio speakers

“Incorporating my interest in personal environments and the everyday, I explore ideas of perception, memory, and the spatialization of time. I use simple formal means and optical tricks to investigate distance and intimacy and the link between the act of viewing and the act of remembering.”

Telescope House is a construction in the shape of a vernacular structure (of the same name) common in Buffalo and the mid-west. Consisting of three archetypical “house” sections, each one larger than the next – as if “telescoping” from one to the other – viewers are invited to peer through one end to watch the videos. The construction contains a viewing system with which viewers can interact by turning a focus knob to move from one image to the other.

Link to video which demonstrates interaction and each of the three videos playing within the construction:

VISIO

DOROTHEA BRAEMER 

DOROTHEA BRAEMER 

“Tree House” installation

An ode to the two 100-year old silver maples in front of our house that were cut down. (Dollhouse, video projection, animation)

Dorothea is an independent media artist and documentary filmmaker, arts advocate, and educator interested in art and media as an agent for social change and cultural initiatives that are located outside of the mainstream

Born in Starnberg, Bavaria and based in Buffalo, N.Y., Dorothea Braemer has been active in the U.S. alternative media scene since the 1990s. An award-winning film and video maker and the former executive director of the media access center Squeaky Wheel/Buffalo Media Resources, 

Braemer’s work as a filmmaker, educator, and arts advocate is informed by her own experience and active participation in the various communities of which she is a part. Her video projects and installations explore such themes as family, cultural displacement, and community activism, often incorporating wry humor..

VINCENZO MISTRETTA 

Vincenzo Mistretta

b. 1965

Italian

Born: Sicily, Italy

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Vincenzo (“Vince”) Mistretta is a filmmaker and visual artist. He was born in Sicily and immigrated to the United States with his family as a child. In his adult life he has lived in Buffalo, N.Y.; New York City; and Palermo, Sicily. He began his career as a visual artist in 1989 after graduating from Pratt Institute in New York City with a BFA in Painting. His paintings have been exhibited in Italy and the U.S. and are in numerous collections in Italy and France.

KATRIN PESCH

KATRIN PESCH

“Hudson River Park”

Slide projection, 80 slides, dimensions variable, 2002

A quasi-documentary narration shifting between fact and fiction, Hudson River Park deals with the development of the Waterfront Park on the Hudson River in New York City. The sequence of images is interspersed with text featuring text based on reports of the project's controversial development process. Guided by this disembodied narrator, the viewer is invited to enter the space.

Katrin Pesch is an artist, filmmaker and writer. She holds a PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism with a Concentration in Art Practice from the University of California San Diego. An alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program, she has exhibited internationally in film festivals, art spaces and museums. Her writing has been published in Studies in French Cinema and Anthropology and Humanism, and several edited collections. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the School of Communication/Film Program at the University of Southern Mississippi. 

http://www.katrinpesch.info/

AMALIA PISTILLI 

AMALIA PISTILLI 

"The Past is Never Past"

Cave Painter - Abstractions- shown in image above

Archival paper print- $150 each

Born in Naples, Italy, where she worked in theatre, performance art and photo-installation. She then moved to England where she was a freelance jazz photographer for many years, with work published in magazines, used for LP and CD covers, and exhibited. She has also lived, studied and worked in the USA, Canada and Mexico. Currently, she writes non-fiction (memoir and essays on art) and continues her visual explorations. She lives in Genoa, Italy.

About the work: "The Past is Never Past" comes from Amalia's six years life in Mérida, Yucatán, where she was immediately fascinated and horrified by the amount of decaying and abandoned houses in the downtown area. These are beautiful houses in the “colonial” style (no resemblance to the same in North American architecture), made of mamposteria—a technique of raising a wall with stone upon stone, already used by the ancient Maya. As the soil there is almost all limestone, the material is readily available, and the technique also lets the walls breathe, which is necessary in such a hot and humid climate.

But these images are more than just “abandoned” places, or decaying walls. They are mute testimonies of another trend, that of foreign expats and speculators moving in, buying these abandoned properties, and renovating them. Often these renovations occur without any respect for the integrity of the original architecture. These expats, especially the American ones, seem to be pursuing some kind of preposterous Hollywood dream, building behind colonial facades (which for Mexican law must remain intact) modernist cubes made of cinder blocks and glass, highly unsuited to the climate and the vernacular architecture of the Yucatán. They put pools and air conditioning in, they use toxic materials and pollute the already very damaged, fragile environment (Mérida is a city of over a million people, and growing, without any sewer system); they overuse water and electricity resources that are already poorly managed and scarce, and they do all this with the complicity of local architects and contractors and with an abandon that they would perhaps feel somewhat ashamed of in their native countries.

And so, once again, Mexico gets plundered, with its own people often complicit in this: the new face of colonialism is that of expats and foreign retirees.

These once broken walls were as beautiful and multi-layered as abstract paintings, but when framed in the above social context take on a different valence: that of reminders of a past that is never really past, no matter how we decide to bury it. Most of the walls photographed some years ago are now smooth and painted over and belong to newly-renovated houses; yet nature has a way of reclaiming everything, and it is common there to have to repaint walls at least once a year or even more often, because the paint starts peeling off very quickly due to the high humidity.

This is the stratification of history and histories.

GIULIANO LOMBARDO

GIULIANO LOMBARDO

“Damasco Gate Motorceptor”

Jerusalem, Israel/Palestine 2019

Digital video 9'35" 1080p 16:9

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The video was shot in March 2019 during a workshop about space and architecture. I was interested in the way people moved and lived these important architectural landmarks. I wanted, so to speak, to eliminate the postcard from the place.

The main idea is to eliminate all static visual information. This is

obtained by using a fixed camera angle during the shooting. The video is then edited using a simple subtractive process, only showing the difference between one frame and the next.

This process somewhat mirrors the work carried out by specific neural

modules in the brain that specialize in discerning and isolating

information about movement that occurs in the external environment.

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Giuliano Lombardo, artist, based in Rome, Italy. He applies a multidisciplinary approach and different tecniques (audio-visual, photography, sound, installation and performance). His goal is the creation of devices that interlace contingency and sharing in order to stimulate a creative fruition.

 TIM RIDLEN

TIM RIDLEN

The Storehouse of Language, 2014

HD Video / Sound, Loop

If Film is a Language, Can Birds Make Movies?, 2014

9 Ink Jet Prints

These diagrammatic drawings are based on the film theory and practice of Pier Paolo Pasolini, who thought that cinema had a discernible language-like structure even though it was poetic and “pre-grammatical.” Around the same time that Pasolini developed his theory of film language, his film Hawks and Sparrows (1966) told the story of a talking crow and other birds that learn to speak. The piece on view here playfully takes the next step and asks, if film is a language and birds can talk, can birds make movies?

The video, titled The Storehouse of Language, is an attempt to translate one of the drawn diagrams (the second in the series) into architectural and videographic space. The “storehouse of language” is the name that Ferdinand de Saussure, the Swiss linguist and founder of semiology, gave to the repository of concepts and the structure of grammar that a language draws on. As languages are used, they draw from this storehouse, which Saussure thought was relatively fixed and stable, hence his architectural metaphor. Pasolini adopted the idea that film language drew from a storehouse of images that consisted of memory, dreams, and the history film.

Together, the drawings and video loop were part of larger project titled The Artist’s Field Library that examined the relationship between artistic practice and other forms of knowledge.

http://www.timridlen.info/

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