Hot August Nights: Video Open Call
August 4th 6 to 9 pm
This August – for one night only – Grizzly Grizzly will screen videos selected from our national open call. Works range from serene to chaotic, from live action to stop motion, performative to meditative, and from visceral to humorous. Hot August Nights features the work of nine artists: Rachelle Beaudoin, Gigi Bennett, David Dempewolf, Tyler Kline, Noah McWilliams, Curtis Miller, Shay Overstone, Phantom Power Boot, Elia Vargas, Marianna Dixon Williams.
Rachelle Beaudoin: Often employing physical comedy, my videos document performances in which I explore the pressures and contradictions I face on a daily basis. I push concepts from web videos and advertising to the absurd so that the content becomes humorous and sometimes alarming. Since becoming a mother, this experience has become part of my work. I have created videos to address the infantilization of expectant mothers and reality of caring for children and parents. Personal, sometimes awkward, yet open and inviting, the work emphasizes the physicality of the body, showing both vulnerability and strength, following in the tradition of feminist performance art. This work comes from a place of experience and honesty.
Gigi Bennett: In my colored pencil drawings and multimedia films, I depict miniature sculptures of domestic architecture. These delicate, ghostly forms made of frail material represent the fragility of the structure of the home as well as its relationship to beauty and impermanence. I build ethereal worlds when I make still life setups with the house sculptures, patterned fabrics, childhood photographs, flowers, fragments of plants and other trinkets. With a soft touch, minimal contrast, and a limited color palette, I then make small, intimate images that capture the memory of these objects. These observational drawings place me in a state of love and appreciation for my subject matter before I apply an element of destruction. Many of the sculptures are made of water soluble paper and thread, and placed in water to be dissolved. I then reexamine the ruined domestic structures by delicately pinning them up on a cork board and drawing them with a focus on their split seams, and crumpled walls. Throughout the entire process, I document the life of the sculptures on video. Before their destruction, I make scenes that play with scale and make the sculptures appear to be lived in. I make shots of the houses as they are washed away by strong ocean waves, or very slowly disappearing in still water. I combine these scenes with sand animation that reveals the emotions of the home. The film in combination with the drawings of the shattered homes and the depictions of the pristine sculptures altogether express the reality of the impermanence that exists in our homes on both an intimate and environmental level. The drawings serve as a desperate attempt to hold onto something with an inevitable fate of death, while the moving images are a means of studying and revealing the truth of their vulnerable state of being.
David Dempewolf: Since 2008, David Dempewolf has been producing videos that simulate perceived stereoscopic vision and mental imagery. These videos portray saccadic eye movements, retinal afterimages, daydreams, sheets of memory and moments of eidetic reverie. Through a stuttering investigation of phenomenological experience and the meandering legacy of American experimental film, Dempewolf has been attempting to force the moving image into mimicking the processes of thought. Dempewolf is interested in mental phenomena and how to translate imagery that is visible when one’s eyes are closed. The animated sequence was produced in 2019 as an experiment with inverted and secondary color mixtures. Using a simple grid matrix the animation explores apparent movement through Gestalt phenomena such as good figure, proximity and closure. The animation was combined with recorded audio from rain water dripping onto an upside down steel bucket during the during first wave of the pandemic and gives form to the sense of uncertainty and anticipation of that time.
Tyler Kline: My exploration of video veers off the road at the intersection of late stage capitalism and jester coping mechanisms to mask autism; once off road I am primarily interested in how social syntax is breaking down and the emergence of a new clown police semantics.
Noah McWilliams: Driven by an urge to bring the strange and improbable to life, I try to shed light on hidden motivations, and by extension, the often dismal nature of our grand aspirations. Brutality, exploitation, and loss of control are key themes in my work, and they operate within meticulously constructed worlds of cinematic pomp. By nesting these challenging themes in the realm of fantasy, I sneak my sculptural and time-based vignettes into the home as safely compartmentalized entertainment. Elements of set design and traditional cinematic special effects are intended to satisfy the viewers appetite for spectacle while hinting at something existential. The fantasies are constructed using decorative materials that have been tortured into submission and imbued with a look of bodily distress. The body is always vulnerable, and bodily references exist in my work to add an element of doubt to the implied narratives and their flamboyant presentation.
Curtis Miller: is an artist and educator working across film, video, photography, and publication. He is the co-founder of Flatland Chicago with Chris Reeves. His films have screened internationally at the Centre for Contemporary Arts - Glasgow, EXIS - Seoul, Fracto - Berlin, Montreal Underground Film Festival, and the Kinodot Experimental Film Festival - St Petersburg. His work has shown domestically at the Chicago Underground Film Festival, ICDOCS, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, the Hyde Park Arts Center - Chicago, Indiana University - Bloomington, Gallery 400 - Chicago, Tiger Strikes Asteroid - Chicago, and Renaissance TV - Renaissance Society, Chicago. He has taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the City Colleges of Chicago, and most recently as lecturer for the Department of Art, Theory, and Practice at Northwestern University.
Shay Overstone: I waved goodbye to my family and everything I knew to become an alien in America. Initially romanced, I engaged with customs I had watched on TV from my living room floor as a child. Time passed, being an outsider wasn’t so fun anymore and assimilating meant becoming afraid of needing a doctor and realizing my dream of going to college was accepting a debt I couldn’t see the end of. Hope seemed to always wash over me though. Using video work, writing, photography and other forms of documentation my practice explores the magnificence in the mundane. How deep are the innovative waters of the working class? What does it mean to become American? How does it feel to share a life with someone without being in their physical presence for years and years? I don’t have the answers, I dream I never do.
Phantom Power Boot (Patrick Boehmcke and Xuan Liu): We made this video during a period where we were destroying a bunch of old and unused camcorders we had lying around. It wasn't so much a planned out piece as it was an opportunity to play around with whatever materials we had on hand at a given time.
Elia Vargas: Dr. Elia Vargas is an artist and a scholar working across multiple mediums, ranging from video and sound to writing and performance, focused on naturecultural media practices. His work is critical, speculative, ecological, energetic, and technocultural. It is engaged in an interdisciplinary approach with contemporary and historical experimental media, digital cultural, and feminist science studies. His current work considers the cultural, philosophical, and techno-scientific conditions of the early American oil industry and argues for refiguring crude oil as media to decenter anthropocentric representations of nature. Towards the pursuit of challenging historical forms of meaning-making, he is interested in concepts that perform change—a multi-species, or posthumanist practice of worlding. His work seeks non-representational ways to trouble the entanglements of nature, culture, and technology. Vargas collaborates widely with artists, musicians, and institutions. He holds a PhD from UC Santa Cruz. He is currently a visiting assistant professor of Media Study at the University at Buffalo, and is commissioned by Goethe Institute to host and produce a monthly podcast on global technocultural exchange. He is the co-founder of the SF Bay Area art and technology organization, the Living Room Light Exchange.
Marianna Dixon Williams: I build handmade electronic objects and develop installations that question themes of identity, environmental change, and the ability of this world to be simulated, emulated, and measured digitally. My environmental work runs parallel to my relationship to the intersecting cultures that I inhabit. By representing the landscape - using technology and representation to share stories of navigation, loss, growth, and sensing - I have been able to tell more of my story. As a response to expanding technology, the inability to define borders in ecological or social change, and as an analysis of relations and participation, this work also stands as a practice rooted in deep listening. Listening invites presence and acknowledges the value and importance of perspectives beyond our own. In telling our story to someone, we enter into trust. And true community, the kind that we can call home, requires the discovery of a story that is shared.
Grizzly Grizzly is a project space in Philadelphia, PA. Since 2009, Grizzly Grizzly has programmed monthly exhibitions, screenings, and performances. The gallery is currently under the direction of artists Erin Boyle, Amy Hicks, Diedra Krieger, Connor Longo, Jayne Struble, and intern John Kozacheson.
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