Photography & Intermedia

“ImXCocteau”, 2009
13:12 trt, color, stereo, DV, 4:3
Video: Alysse Stepanian, Music: Philip Mantione

While manipulating footage from Jean Cocteau’s “Blood of A Poet”, I sensed an excitement about the new technology that Cocteau must have felt eighty years ago, when he experimented with manipulating images through filming tricks and available technology of the time. (Alysse Stepanian) The music for ImXCocteau was created using custom software written in MAX/Msp that manipulated soprano sax samples (Eric Roberts) and field recordings made in the desert. (Philip Mantione)

Alysse Stepanian and Philip Mantione have collaborated on videos, mutimedia performances and installations since 1986. In 2005 -2007 they collaborated as BOX 1035, creating installations in Berlin, Beijing, and New York. Beijing’’s City Weekend Magazine listed their 2006 installation, “Don’t be afraid, be ready” as number one of the top 5 exhibits.
www.box1035.com

Atrium Gallery – Western Michigan University

Alysse Stepanian’s videos, installations, paintings, photographs, web art, and performances have been presented in over 30 countries. She is the creator and curator of Manipulated Image video screenings based in the US, and has participated in collaborative curations with VideoChannel Cologne. For October of 2012 she is curating a collection of videos for art:screen fest in Örebro, Sweden. Screenings of her own videos include: The Museum of Actual Art, Mexico City; Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, Maryland; Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires (as part of ECVP Vol. 3); Arad Art Museum in Romania; Anthology Film Archives, New York City; Vasteras Konstmuseum, Sweden; 4th Gaza International Festival For Video Art; Teatro Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Arte Cubano in Havana; Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin.
http://alyssestepanian.com
http://manipulatedimage.com

Philip Mantione has composed music for orchestra, chamber ensembles, computer, fixed media, interactive performance, multimedia installations and experimental video. His music has premiered at such venues as Merkin Hall in NYC; the Bing Theatre at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; FILE 2011 and 2010 – Electronic Language International Festival – Hypersonica at SESI’ Cultural Centre in San Paulo, Brazil; the Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, NM; European Media Arts Festival in 2001 in Osnabrück, Germany; and most recently a 16 channel audio piece at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània in Barcelona, Spain.
http://www.philipmantione.com

Jöns and the Spider
Duration: 06’24”
Year of production: 2010
Technique: Cut-out puppet stop-frame Animation on Rostrum Camera

A little boy gets locked in a house in the forest by his master, who has ordered him to make violins. The boy painstakingly builds violins, longing for his freedom and the sweet sound of their music, when a spider appears in his life to give his dreams a sprinkle of hope.

Atrium Gallery – Western Michigan University

Marie-Margaux is an Italian and Greek film-maker and Illustrator based in London, who started working with Animation in 2005, while in her Foundation year at the UCA. (former KIAD). Her interest in Animation lead her to Kingston University London, from where she graduated in 2008 with a First Class BA Honours degree in Illustration and Animation for her graduation film ‘He Seemed Lovely’. Moving straight to the Royal College of Art for an MA in Animation, she continued working using her sketchbooks, observational drawing and life drawings as her main source of inspiration and animation. While at the RCA she created two more films: ‘Eric, do you exist?’ which was completed in 2009 and her graduation film ‘My Mother’s Coat’ in 2010. Her interest in documentary animation has lead her to the use of interviews for the inspiration and creation of all of her films, with the ‘familial circle’ being her main theme of interest and exploration. Her film ‘My Mother’s Coat’ has been screened in festivals worldwide, including Onedotzero, Stuttgart Trickfilm festival and Edinburgh Film festival and received an award for ‘Best Film’ in Tallinn, Estonia, by the Estonian Academy of Arts Animation students jury, in 2010 and in the Animasyros Animation festival in Greece in 2011. Jons and the Spider is her first stop-frame puppet animation, which she co-directed with Soyoung Hyun.

www.marie-margaux.co.uk

Soyoung Hyun is a Korean film-maker based in London, who graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Animation in 2011. Prior to this she received a BA Hons in Hyper media Design from the Hansung University in Korea. Her MA graduation film ‘How Life Tastes’ has been selected for screening in various festivals including SICAF in Korea and L’Alternativa in Spain. Recently, Soyoung is working freelance as an animator in London.

Amelia Winger-Bearskin’s new video, “Creation Story” retells the Iroquois creation myth at the same time deconstructing the art of storytelling and the importance of myth in shaping what is to come. A conversation between Amelia and fellow artist Wendy Red Star was the beginning of “Creation Story.” Wendy’s costumes and photographs served as the artistic direction of a story that Amelia had been working out in various other iterations over the last few years. Wendy Red Star’s magical costumes are what happen when the height of Motown glam meets Crow Indian Pow-Wow costumes.

Winger-Bearskin’s Statement about “Creation Story”

“It is my great great grand son who is taught to believe in myth and Science, in heaven and hell. He will explore the stars and look for the places that the past has spoken about: the dancers who make constellations, the turtle’s back, the 7 day miracle, he will wonder about science in hushed places in his mind. In the heavens of our imagination the children of the future are waiting for the beginning Of the world.”

Atrium Gallery – Western Michigan University

Amelia Winger-Bearskin is currently an Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Vanderbilt University in the area of Video and Performance Art, in Nashville, Tn. She was classically trained as an Opera Singer in Rochester NY at the Eastman conservatory of music, and then finished her Undergraduate degree at George Mason University in 2000. While at GMU she studied sculpture and time based art and received her BAIS in Performance Art. She went on to do her MFA in Transmedia (time based art) at University of Texas at Austin in 2008. She was in the group show Art in the Age of the Internet at the Chelsea Art Museum in 2007 and was a featured video and performance artist at Basel in Miami, Scope at the Lincoln Center and other art fairs consistently since 2007 as an artist at large for the perpetual art machine [PAM]. She has been focusing her performances primarily on Asian performance festivals this year as she finds that regionally Asia has created a unique method of support for Performance Art, she has performed at the 10th Annual OPEN ART Performance Art festival in Beijing, China, The Performance Art Network PANAsia ’09 in Seoul, South Korea, the TAMA TUPADA 2010 Media and Performance festival in the Philippines and and she just returned from a month in Sao Paulo Brazil where she performed as the first American performance artist to be invited to the Verbo Performance Art Festival and was part of an international scholar exchange sponsored by University of Sao Paulo and Vanderbilt University VIO and Art Department. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Art Art Zine a new online publication of art and society for the South and the Director of the Women’s Art League of Tennessee (W.A.L)

http://www.studioamelia.com

Dauphin is a term referring to the heir-apparent to the French throne. In the animation I explored the many iconic elements and narratives surrounding French monarchy such as lions, crowns, and the Fleur-de-lis by mixing them with elements from a more contemporary iconography. There is an almost irreverent use and misuse of these references in an attempt to create an absurd reality that is both familiar and alien at the same time.

Atrium Gallery – Western Michigan University

Jonathan Monaghan (b. New York, 1986) makes short films that combine high end computer animation with surreal and fantastical scenes drawn from religious themes, popular culture and Western history. Work by Jonathan Monaghan has been shown in the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C., the Today Art Museum in Beijing, as well as other galleries and venues in New York, Oslo, Berlin and London. His most recent solo exhibition “Life Tastes Good in Disco Heaven” was reviewed in the Washington Post.

www.jonmonaghan.com

Living Organics explores issues of trust, destruction and loss through characters that exist within constructed environments. In this new world, things are not always as they appear. The natural order of beings is disrupted and altered, challenging our perceptions of what is good and pure. Malevolence and innocence intermingle in this place, with sadness as their common denominator. The film delves into that small space where evil and beauty meet, seductively soft yet dangerously quiet, providing an alluring foundation for a narrative to take shape.

Living Organics is a 10:44 experimental stop motion animation comprised of approximately 19,000 individual photographs shot on a Canon D-SLR.

Atrium Gallery – Western Michigan University

Kiera Faber is a visual artist working in the mediums of film, photography, and drawing. She received her MFA from the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY. Faber’s films have been nationally and internationally exhibited, most notably in Greece, Armenia, Brazil, New Zealand, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Nevada, Michigan and New York. Her first film, Children of God, was the 1st place grant winner of the Wonder Women Short Film Competition held at the Pen and Brush Gallery, NYC. Faber’s animation, Living Organics, was screened at the George Eastman House Museum of Photography and nominated for best domestic animation at the Queens International Film Festival. Solo exhibitions of Living Organics and its accompanying photographic series, 09.01.29, have been exhibited in Minneapolis and Altoona, PA. As part of the Midwest Photographers Project, Faber’s animation and photographic series is in the temporary collection of The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. Currently, Faber is working on a combined stop motion animation and live motion short film funded through an Artist Intuitive Grant in Media Arts from the MN State Arts Board and a faculty research grant through St Cloud State University. Faber’s studio is in Saint Joseph, MN.

http://kierafaber.com

My work stems from a nomadic aesthetic, immersing images, sounds and the visitor in a sort of collage. It’s a collage, which constantly redefines ambling spaces, through aimless video loops combined with sounds and silences that interrupt the flow of images. It’s a collage that deploys a resistance to fix defined positions, both in space and in time. The fluidity of the visual and sound spaces sets the stage for a view of the subject, which is in a state of constantly becoming. It is vagrancy, where my motive force, is a visual and auditory movement, one that affectively rests in the viewer and never on the screen. It orients, disorients, links and ruptures sound and image in fluid variations, one that loops in the end, as discontinuously as any contemporary attempt at fixing in time or space our personal subjectivity.

For many years I constructed large-scale installations of architectural and spatial elements with technological components such as video surveillance, photography and sound. That work raised questions about memory, time, space and the body. This past work reiterated that the technological eye sees, but has no gaze, it is a vertigo of seeing which strips away both place and being. More and more our eyes desert the “flesh of the world ” in order to read graphic electronic representations instead of seeing things. Spatiality (I include the body) is reduced to a visual construct alone, a way of seeing and a way of being seen, it’s an ideational process in which the “image” of reality takes ontological precedence over the tangible substance and appearance of the real world (Virilio). I looked at how technology isolates, appropriates and affects our understanding of spaces and the body.
Presently, my use of photo/video images, interactivity and sound technologies, orients the work where the poetic and the seduction of images create a psychologically unsettling space that questions our time/space experience as well as our experience of the self/subject. The work originates in an investment of the subject as agent, meaning a multiplicity and multidimensionality of its positions in relation to art’s discourse, its investment and of its political powers to resist, to criticize and to contradict. It is a space evoked by but also remote from structures, language and articulated experience. It’s a dialectic space between presence and absence, which I like to call “ailleurs” (the elsewhere) – a space situated at the intersection between the real and its metaphor. In this context, I will say that Art is largely social for me because it resuscitates again and again, our fears or desires, our hopes and anxieties, recording through itself our struggles as people who are acting at once in relationships to each other and living in a world that has its own relationships.

Atrium Gallery – Western Michigan University

Sylvie Bélanger was born in Montréal, Canada. She is now based in Toronto. She received an MFA from York University and a BFA from Concordia University. She has exhibited her multimedia installations across Canada, in the USA; in several cities in France, Germany, Spain, England and the Netherlands. In Asia, she has exhibited in Yokohama, Tokyo, Bangkok, Manila and Shanghai. Several catalogues on her art practice have been published and, reviews of her work can be found in ArtForum, Art in America, ArtPress, Parachute and others. Bélanger’s works are in collections of Gemeente Museum, The Netherlands; Za Moca Foundation, Tokyo, Japan; Windsor Art Gallery, Canada; Musée du Québec, Canada; Galeria Oliva Arauna, Spain; Art Bank of Canada; MacDonald Stewart Art Center, Canada; Woodlawn Arts Foundation, Toronto, Canada and private collections. She was the recipient of the Stauffer Award, and has received numerous professional grants from The Nuala Dresher Fellowship, New York State, the Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the External Affairs of Canada. Sylvie Bélanger is represented by Birch Libralato Gallery, Toronto, Canada.

http://sylviebelanger.com

In my youth the experience of calling out to the wolves of the northern forest was profound. It developed not only a connection to another, it was a direct interaction with entities that were not human but willing to communicate. That interaction seemed to hold depths of communication beyond concept, it was not a communication of a literal kind, nor an emotional one, it resonated as pure communication of being. In the telling of stories we communicate not only information but deeper meanings in our tone and commitment to the story being told. In the contemporary context of globalization we are aware of such cross cultural exchanges, I see this no differently. In the context of those early exchanges the wolves’ modes of communication with each other were not withheld, were not restricted to their own kind, and I can not bring myself to believe they did so unawares. The implications of this was to define those experiences in my mind as a cultural exchange.

Calling out seeks to envelop not only those past experiences but to examine the implications of communication with our natural environments and their non-human cultures. Coming out of a specific examination of story-telling – it speaks to a view of such exchanges as methodologies of story-telling, if only we listen in the context the story is told – in a visceral sense as opposed to a literal one. The information that is stored with in the archetypes of their tonality and resonance defining their meaning. In the action that calling out is a documentation of the intention is to seek that connection with the land and the concerns of our longing for contact with our natural world. The environment is integrated into the video on a technical level in so far as the focus of the video is affected by the audio which defines the focus of the frames. The louder the sound more demand it places on the technology in a cold environment resulting in a fluctuation in the imagery, in a sense the resonance of the call permeates and affects even the technology. The depth of that resonance and a desire to seek it out in a landscape now devoid of any response is intended to speak to the loss of that connection or for that matter, the potential for that connection.

Atrium Gallery – Western Michigan University

Matt Ceolin: A naturalist, conceptualist, multidisciplinary artist, author, and arts educator, Matt Ceolin is a graduate of Ontario College of Art and Design and the University of Windsor. His work comes out of a deep connectedness to the environment and is engaged in examining fluid processes of interacting with nature in pursuit of a more visceral sensibility of its portrayal. His studio practice is based in a terrestrial area in which he engages natural ecologies and entities, and from which he draws his materials. Aside from his studio practice over the past decade, Ceolin has worked as a forest firefighter, instructor for Algoma University, and a freelance bookbinder and designer. Most recently, he focused his energies as founder and proprietor of the Arcadia Project, a multi-faceted creative arts centre in Sault Ste. Marie from 2005 to 2010. Ceolin’s visual work has been exhibited at galleries throughout Ontario; his major works to date include Entomechology, Treatise on Imaginary Particles, and the New Herbarium project. He currently resides in the forests of Algoma, where he is immersed in numerous projects in collaboration with the environment and its inhabitants.

http://mattceolin.ca

A reflection on the survival and persistence of the Lakota people as well as the relationship between white and Native Americans. The title refers to a Western, made in 1931, from which the footage of the Oklahoma land rush is appropriated and run backward in a kind of unsettling of the West. The original Cimarron is noted for it’s stereotypical portrayals of Native Americans.

A poetic investigation into the invisibility of loss as it plays out on the landscape of an infamous tragedy, ‘Hyacinth’ was produced in 2008 after a visit to the site of Jonestown, Guyana, where in 1978, over 900 members of the People’s Temple lost or took their own lives in a mass murder-suicide. The word Jonestown is never used in the video in an attempt to separate the narrative of the People’s Temple from its Kool-Aid colored infamy

Atrium Gallery – Western Michigan University

Lydia Moyer is a visual artist and media maker who lives and works in central Virginia. She runs the new media program in the art department at the University of Virginia.      

http://goodfornow.net