April 25th/Saturday/7PM

Light-Soluble

Mediums

OUR LAST SHOW!! It was only 14 months, but it was an amazing time running The Picture Show. Thank you to everyone who made this space what it became, something far beyond our initial intention.

We are very pleased to be having our last show as the culmination of our open-call collaboration with OPR, the hybrid screening/reading event, Light-Soluble Mediums.

This event was an open-call response to a PROMPT from the Organism for Poetic Research. The night includes a collection of readings and short video works.

Here is a list of the artists participating. More on their works to follow.

Courtney Stephens
Zak Margolis
Julian Hou
Amie Robinson
Tiziana La Melia
Jeff T. Johnson
Lucy Ives
Anna Moser
Sylvia Hardy
Arvo Leo
Lanny Jordan Jackson
Yves Sheriff
Justin Gradin
John Melillo
Derek Woods

AMIE ROBINSON


After receiving her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, Amie studied art in Berlin, and then earned an MFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has exhibited drawings and animations at museums and galleries in Amsterdam, Athens, Berlin, Miami and New York. She lives and in Brooklyn, and teaches art to students on the autism spectrum.

Synopsis:

Based on the Icelandic myth of the Nykur, a water horse with backwards hooves and sticky skin, this stop-motion animation follows a young girl as she is pulled below the murky waters to drown. Sinking, she finds herself surrounded by mysterious marine life and the lungs and limbs of past victims. To free herself, she must use the only known talisman against the creature, which is simply to say “Nykur” aloud, transforming the mythic beast into a normal horse doomed to plough the fields.

ARVO LEO

Arvo Leo lives in Hamburg, Germany.

Synopsis:
A few years ago a woman named Anne-Claire invited me to a dinner party in Rotterdam but I was away in Paris so I requested a dinner rain check; a rain check request in the form of a large poster folded up and sent in the mail (like those over-sized checks people sometimes hold and smile with for photos). I suppose I could have just sent Anne-Claire an email, but I decided I would use this opportunity to exaggerate the mundanity of daily correspondence while fondling the veil of social etiquette slightly.

I also like that the rain check is just a coupon to guarantee something else in the future. It is absolutely useless aside from what it promises. If you wake up one morning and there is no water coming out of your shower you may eventually notice that your landlord slipped a rain check for water under your door. But sometimes when you go in the shower you want more than just water-eventually, or coming-soon-water. Sometimes you need water at the moment when you need it; even if it’s rainy, even if it’s stormy out. Therefore on these pleasant days when the shower water is already available when you need it, you could just use the rain check as a towel. Let it be physical and tangible and somewhat absorptive. Let it be useful in the present rather than in the future for a change.

Then two years later when I was applying for a grant or something I was having a difficult time summarizing Anne-Claire’s letter within a single image so I made a video to better articulate the devilish details. What happened next was the video slipped away from being pure documentation and began to grow a life of its own. It is a life that grew from a letter yes, but it’s also a life that grew from an inability to not always be able to summarize things succinctly.

Now it is 2015, the video is not a baby anymore, it is three years old; on the cusp of leaving the toddler world. Who knows what the video will look like as a teenager or as an elder, and who knows how it will act in these later stages of life. Nothing is very conclusive at this stage except for the fact that the video will certainly be a pedophile (an art-on-art pedophile that is). I say this because I have recently noticed that the video has become utterly captivated with itself at the youthful age of three and it is obvious that this toddler captivation will continue for the rest of its life and will inevitably leak over onto other three year old art works, lusting after these recently made creations and sometimes establishing a more than cozy proximity to them.

TIZIANA LA MELIA & TAMARA HENDERSON

Tamara Henderson, (born in 1982 Sackville, NB Canada), is based in Vancouver, Canada. She has an MFA and has studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax Nova Scotia, Stadelschule in Frankfurt, and Royal Art Institute in Stockholm. Her recent solo exhibitions include: 'Charmers Scripture' Rodeo London, ‘Speaking in Scales’ at Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, USA, ‘Resorting’ as part of ‘Live’ at Frieze, ‘Sans Tete ­ Au Monde’ at Kunsthall. Upcoming shows include Consider the Belvedere at ICA in Philadelphia. Henderson is represented by Rodeo, London and Istanbul.

Tiziana La Melia is an artist and writer who lives and works in Vancouver. She is currently editing a collection of poetry with Publication Studio Vancouver, and a chapbook with Perro Verlag Press. She recently mounted the exhibition Innocence at Home at CSA (Vancouver). Forthcoming group exhibitions include Stopping the Sun in its Course at Francois Ghebaly Gallery (Los Angeles) and Through a Window, at SFU/Audain Gallery (Vancouver).

Synopsis:

Tiziana La Melia and Tamara Henderson
3 Pockets di O Getti
16 mm color film with optical sound Length: 2:25 mins. Sound: Julian Hou, Johan Bjork, 2013

tasche vinile di babys breath making vapour, tasche a rete di dutch still life (oyster, coral, glass of beer, shrimp), tascha piatta cut out of a painted back drop.

ALISON DAVIS

Alison Davis is an animator based in Winnipeg, Canada. While she always produces work frame-by-frame, her animated shorts range far and wide in both subject and technique. From personal experience to fantastical worlds, narrative to experimental, digitally refined to entirely hand drawn, her works explore the vast imaginative and visual possibilities of animation as a medium. Davis holds a BFA in Film Animation from Concordia University in Montreal, and has had the good fortune of screening her films and videos at festivals and events across Canada and around the world.

Synopsis:

A meditation on opulence, desire and excess Luxuriate uses stop-motion to animate second-hand fur pelts and gold chains. The hypnotic movement of the chains over fur indulges the tactility of the materials while highlighting the contrast between the hard mineral and the soft biological natures of these desirable objects.

ANNA MOSER & JOSIAH CUNEO

Anna Moser writes and makes art in New York City, where she is a doctoral candidate in English at NYU. Her recent visual work examines questions of resemblance and objecthood through formal gestures that often reference linguistic problems: redaction, annotation, semantic fragmentation, and nonsense. Is this greenness a garden or a lawn chair? Is it a cave or a bird with a long tongue? She is interested in the capacity of an image to hover on the edge of recognition, asking us see not only what we can but what we want. Website: www.annaccmoser.com.

Josiah Cuneo is a Brooklyn based filmmaker and composer. In 2014 Roulette hosted the premier of Cuneo’s multimedia performance Scenes, four short films accompanied by a performance of original chamber music by string trio Dissemble. Cuneo’s films focus on the interplay of music and dance to explore themes of daily ritual, daydreams and the fluidity of memory. Josiah Cuneo’s work has been featured at Roulette, New York; Exit Art, New York; Gallery Satori, New York; Issue Project Room, New York; Phantom Brain Exchange, Montague, MA; and Hampden Gallery, Amherst, MA.

SYNOPSIS:

Astoria Park (2014) is a short film by Anna Moser and Josiah Cuneo. The project began on September 28th, 2013, when Moser and Cuneo spent an afternoon together using handheld microphones and cameras to record their visual and aural impressions of Astoria Park in Queens, a site chosen for its unfamiliarity to both of them. An abandoned swimming pool conjured the uncanny sensation of an inverted or excavated monument. Rusty bars of a wrought iron fence were instrumentalized as the source of an echo chamber. The final work reveals traces of a single day filtered, deconstructed, and reassembled through collaboration and contingency. [Collages by Anna Moser. Sound by Josiah Cuneo. Hands variable.]

COURTNEY STEPHENS

Courtney Stephens is a filmmaker and writer based in Los Angeles. Her films and videos have screened internationally and she has lectured at the Royal Geographical Society and elsewhere on film and female travel. Her writing has appeared in New Inquiry, Cabinet, Two Serious Ladies, and Modern Painters, and she programs a weekly screening series in LA called "Veggie Cloud."

Synopsis:

Ida Western Exile explores risk, Western landscapes, and the performance of solitude. The film was shot at Georgia O'Keeffe's Ghost Ranch in Northern New Mexico, the Georgia O'Keeffe museum in Santa Fe, and in Hong Kong commuter trains.

The film is named for Georgia's virtually unknown sister Ida; a talented painter who remained uncelebrated - also unmarried - throughout her life, and whom Georgia once called "a waste." Our modern Ida negotiates risk with the help of a global support team, while freight trains loaded with Chinese goods race across a New Mexico landscape that once represented creative exile. In phone calls with places like Expedia, Kraft, and a Doomsday Preppers Emporium, she compulsively gathers information for a future move (or an internet-fueled fantasy) and stumbles into oblique personal connections.

JEFF T. JOHNSON

Jeff T. Johnson is a digital artist and critic whose ARCHIVERSE project—an open-field concrete poem composed in AutoCAD—is documented at The Organism for Poetic Research web portal. Poetry has recently appeared in PEN America, coconut, BORT, and Forklift, Ohio. Critical writing is forthcoming or has appeared in Jacket2, On Contemporary Practice, Sink Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of LIT and is at work on Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics. He is currently a Visiting Instructor at Pratt Institute. For more information, visit jefftjohnson.com.

Synopsis:

Medium Light Soluble was filmed in one take on an iPad while Slumber Party played on the stereo in my former apartment. Claire Donato held the camera while I opened and inspected the letter from OPR. Several weeks later, I recorded audio of an improvisatory gleaning of language from the letter. I added the secondary audio track via iMovie, keeping original audio as ambience (stereo sound, rustling paper, breathing). I had in mind a scene from Richard Linklater's Slacker, in which a few twenty-somethings wander through an abandoned apartment reading a fractured narrative from postcards presumably left by a former inhabitant. My interest in overlapping time/space in audio-visual format, along with a desire to amplify each muted element, is perhaps apparent. —Jeff T. Johnson

JULIAN HOU

Julian Hou is an artist based in Vancouver. He holds a BFA from Simon Fraser University and an M.Arch from the University of British Columbia. He recently curated the exhibition Corruption of Time's Dust (2014) at 221a, and held a solo exhibition Window Bended Harmony (2014) at CSA Project space. Other group exhibitions includeOccasional Furniture at the Apartment Gallery (2015), Vancouver and upcoming exhibition Through a Window at SFU Galleries. He has recently published reviews in Capilano Review and the Art Book Review.

Film Synopsis:

Fresh Paint pits a low rise rental building against a low-income construction worker who once worked on building it and who now is an occupant. Blending abstract musical compositions with muted pastel tones, the film explores formal considerations in an experimental narrative with semi-autobiographical undertones. Part documentary and part theater, the film interlaces shots of the real conditions of the building site with staged prop sculptures and exaggerated actor performances. Narration written by Mike Loncaric and Sound in collaboration with Dennis Ha.

SYLVIA HARDY

Sylvia Hardy is a Missouri artist based in New York City. In the past few years she has exhibited at Sydhavn Station, Copenhagen, Denmark; Spazio Morris, Milan, Italy; and collaborated with Ada Smailbegović in Of the Dense and Rare published by Triple Canopy.

Synopsis:

Dear Insetto Stecco,

I went out looking for you but could not find you.

Not but against the stucco of the Italian YouTube.

When looking for you in California,

amongst the pressure treated wood of the desert trails,

I had high hopes.

Even if you were there sunken into the Creosote bush,

Perhaps my eyes have misplaced their still sight.

Keep swaying

~slh

Sylvia Hardy
Insetto Stecco
2015
HD Video

YVES SHERIFF

Yves Sheriff's practice is mostly related to the question of process making, in various forms of visual projects that integrate sound, archives, video and mouvement. Through the past 15 years, his work includes collaborations with artists and collectives such as Champ Libre, In Situ, Mårten Spånberg and Steve Piccolo. Yves has founded in 2011 The 3rd Floor Projects, and on-going choreographic laboratory based on questioning the creation process through a critical reading around representational art forms. He is based in Montreal where he works also as a clown specialist for a major circus company.

Synopsis:

“A Temperament” wishes to illustrate, through a simple narrative construction, the geometry of a specific sensation: the tickling that happens when someone is observing something in an open angle. The horizontal lays of sound, image and meanings are moved across by the idea of an ivy, which establishes the sensitive relationship between intuitions and language. To help myself, I used some parts of the beautiful book of Gaston Bachelard, Intuition of the Instant, where he enjoys to observe the complexity of a sensation, stuck in time's elasticity, and the limits of our words, unless it is poetry “a kind of desire for attention, in the dark now; the duration being in grammar and syntax, like an opportunity.”

ZAK MARGOLIS

Zak Margolis is a film maker and animator from Portland, Oregon. He's been especially excited by his different collaborations over the last year. Early last year he worked on the animation for a live one woman musical called “A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff” by Alicia Jo Rabins. Later in 2014, he worked with Christopher Rabilwongse on a porno/puppet film called “Garden Party.” (Look it up! It's guaranteed to delight!) And most recently, he worked with the Organism for Poetic Research on a short film called “Origin of the True Cinema.” He likes hiking and beer.

Synopsis:

What is the nature of Cinema? Is it merely the illusion of motion, of one image flashing on the retina, only to be replaced by another, and another, and another… Strange, isn't it? That you would look for truth in those flashes of light? But, your memory is blurred and unreliable, and your parents have been keeping secrets from you, and their parents from them. So really, you have no discernible history. There is no story. You are a traveller. Naked and alone. The only realness is captured in a certain kind of flickering light. And behind that lies your final journey.

JUSTIN GRADIN

Justin Gradin is a multimedia artist, writer, and musician. As an artist and musician he has shown and performed across North America, the Netherlands and Japan. For two years Justin was also the music editor for the print magazine Color, a magazine that featured art, music, sub-culture, and skateboarding. In addition to Color, Gradin has had seven art books and dozens of zines self-published. Justin has also been active in the community starting, and operating several artist and performance spaces from L.A.’s Mime School to Vancouver BC’s Emergency Room. Currently he releases records and publications on his Grotesque Modern label, two of which are sound art records in collaboration with artist Justin Patterson (of the Arbour Lake Sghool). At present, Justin works and lives in East Vancouver, and is the art director for the band White Lung.

Synopsis:

SEVEN ITEMS
OPR/THE PICTURE SHOW
NEW YORK, 2015

Seven Items is a visual reflection of a found shopping list. Written in a flow of cursive, and printing, on a small scrap of paper, the list presents itself as arbitrary and effortless: was there and end result in mind when it was composed? It is the skeleton of dinner on trial before dinner. Seven Items responds to this piece of ephemera with a visual shopping list -- a list of images randomly grouped together, and selected for aesthetic desire, to expose, and parade the autonomous ingredients without ever seeing them collectively contribute to an end result. The process then becomes the celebrated focus, as does the mystery of the correspondence between the items selected.

DEREK WOODS

Derek Woods is a writer who lives in Houston, TX and in British Columbia. He is working on a doctorate about literature and the history of ecology.

Synopsis:

The Fungal Soul is a video essay that observes the life of the Kingdom Fungi, which are neither plants nor animals. The video asks what sort of soul Aristotle might have given the fungi if he had considered them in his ontology of animals, vegetables, minerals, and humans.

JOHN MELILLO

John Melillo is a writer, performer, and wave-collector, usually under the name Algae & Tentacles. He lives in Tucson, AZ. He meditates on waves at teahupooworks.tumblr.com.

Synopsis:

On “Waves Study”:

But my heart would still yearn for the sound of the waves.

The bright crests of innumerable waves.

…the world ceaselessly assails and beleaguers subjectivity as waves wash round a wreck on the shore…

For all the loud breach of the waves at will.

That is, this is an arbitrary concatenation of wave figures, drawn at will (willfully) from the vast under-archive of wave-noise.