Blue Bird by Yue Hua, a 16mm multi-projector performance
Join the AgX Film Collective during Waltham Open Studios for an after hours screening program of recent works by AgX members, including works on 16mm, video, and a multi-projector expanded cinema performance, followed by a conversation with the filmmakers.
Works by David Bendiksen, Sarah Bliss, Sean Allen Fisher, Alison Folland, Stefan Grabowski, Yue Hua, Kyle Joseph Petty, Michelle Trujillo, Douglas Urbank, Michael Ventura & Monique Choinard.
Doors open at 7:00pm, program starts at 7:30pm
Attendance is free with a suggested sliding scale $5 - $20 donation to support our ongoing work at AgX as an artist-run film lab and collective for moving image artists in the Boston area. Donations can be made in cash, check, or online. No one will be turned away due to lack of funds.
PROGRAM:
(total program runtime 94 minutes)
Give Me a Garden of Weeds, Sean Allen Fisher, 16mm, sound, color, 4:57
A celebration of all things inelegant, tough, and unwanted. Pretty is fine, but when is the last time you saw a gardenia burrow through concrete?
Sean Allen Fisher (born 1979) is an artist and filmmaker based in Massachusetts. Fisher studied film and photography at Emerson College.
Small, Douglas Urbank, 2024, 16mm, silent, b&w, 4:25
The inner lives of figurines.
Douglas Urbank, based in Boston, Massachusetts, is an artist with a background in sculpture and drawing who began to experiment with filmmaking in 2008. His short films have screened in festivals and curated programs, including nationally. at Revolutions Per Minute Festival, Boston, Massachusetts; Microscope Gallery and Millennium Film Workshop in New York; San Francisco Cinematheque’s Crossroads Film Festival; Moviate Underground Film Festival, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Chicago Underground Film Festival; Engauge Experimental Film Festival, Seattle, Washington; and internationally at Mire Lab’s PRISME festival, Nantes, France; and curated programs including, Zumzeig Cinema, Barcelona; Laboratorio Experimental de Cine program, Mexico City; Artist Film Workshop, Melbourne, Australia; and others. He is a founding member of the AgX Film Collective.
Scene from Uncovered, Sarah Bliss, work-in-progress, 16mm to digital, sound, b&w, English, 4:10
Uncovered explores the human relationship to eros, desire, and creativity in aging bodies subject to illness, loss, and death. How do older bodies and psyches engage sexuality? How do we navigate loss of power, ability, vitality, and each other? How do we foster and feed creative power and erotic aliveness in long-term relationships? As single people? Alongside physical disability, hormonal changes and illness? How do we heal from sexual trauma to come into erotic wholeness? How do we face and weather the loss of loved ones? In a culture in which aging bodies are assumed to be sexless and considered neutered, how do we reclaim our erotic power and why does this matter? In what ways is creativity based in eros? How do we talk about these issues and can we normalize them? In Uncovered, the unspoken is voiced, the hidden unbound.
Sarah Bliss is a filmmaker, artist, curator, educator and Buddhist practitioner working artisanally with hand-processed film and with video to make experimental and documentary films that engage personal and social history. She utilizes an experimental ethnography to investigate desire, time, memory, place and to facilitate presence and attunement with the sensate body. Her work is screened internationally at museums, galleries and film festivals including the Ann Arbor Film Festival; Edinburgh International Film Festival; Antimatter; ARKIPEL Jakarta; Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei; Fracto Film Encounter Berlin; and Anthology Film Archives.
Bodies 1, Milwaukee Waters, Michelle Trujillo, 2022, 16mm to digital, sound, b&w, 5:05
Bodies is a series shot on 16mm film that explores the magic and life of bodies of water.
Michelle Trujillo was born in Miami to Colombian and Costa Rican Parents and grew up in South Florida. She received her BA in Multimedia Studies from Florida Atlantic University and her MFA in Film from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is currently living in Boston, MA and is an Assistant Professor in Experimental Film and Media at Hampshire College
The focus of her practice is to question and explore representations of Latinx culture, gender and identity creation. Her work stems from an intersectional feminist perspective but does not always offer solutions to the problems it engages with. Instead, she is concerned with upsetting power structures and notions of normality through disorientation. She works in Spanish, English and Spanglish as a mirroring of her lived experience. She also works in various mediums such as eco and hand-processed 16mm film, digital video, 35mm still film and cyanotypes.
Her films have been exhibited in festivals, galleries and conferences nationally and internationally such as Alchemy Film Festival, 25FPS Festival, Mimesis Documentary Festival and has won multiple awards such as the Lightpress Grant and the LEF Moving Image Grant.
The Sky in the Sky, Michael Ventura & Monique Chouinard, 2023, digital, silent/sound, color, 2:54
The day races by slowing only in the evening.
Michael Ventura is an experimental filmmaker and graduate of Emerson College. He lives in Boston and is a member of the AgX Film Collective.
Monique Chouinard is filmmaker, musician and composer who lives in Salem, MA.
monolithic tenderness, Kyle J. Petty, 2024, 16mm to digital & ultrasound photographs, sound, color and b&w, English, 7:18
A tessellating flicker film that seeks to undo the cold, impersonal architecture of the city by dousing it in organic and domestic forms. Featuring a collaged soundtrack of spam phone calls, pulsing synth chords, bagpipe drones, and a lullaby sung to my daughter while in-utero.
FLICKER WARNING: This film contains stroboscopic imagery
Kyle J. Petty is a visual artist working in film, video, photography, and collage. His film work has screened internationally at Visions du Réel, Barents Ecology Film Festival, and Antimatter Media + Art. Kyle grew up in the Merrimack Valley of New Hampshire, earned a BA from Chester College of New England, and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. He is a member of AgX Film Collective and teaches film production at Montserrat College of Art, Anna Maria College, and Tufts University. Kyle lives in Medford, Massachusetts.
Rainbow Shoals, David Bendiksen, 2024, Hand-processed 16mm developed with 45-year expired photochemistry and transferred to digital, sound, color, 6:05
Explore the mysterious, enchanted rainbow shoals. "Faerie is a perilous land... beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril... richness and strangeness tie the tongue of the traveller who would report them. And while there it is dangerous to ask too many questions, lest the gates be shut and the keys be lost." -- J.R.R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories"
Sound mix: original composition combining cello harmonics, ambient shore audio, and aeolian harp by Ralf Kleemann.
David Bendiksen is a filmmaker, scholar, and teacher who believes in the expressive use of equipment, ideas, materials, and processes. In an era of ever-increasing digital dominance, his creative work emphasizes sustainability through the rich chemical, optical, and mechanical aspects of analog filmmaking. As an interdisciplinary scholar and instructor, David believes in bridging the analog and digital divide in order to equip a new generation of students with the fullest possible set of creative tools to achieve their vision. David has taught over a dozen different film-related courses across Film Studies, Comparative Literature, CHFA, and French at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Emerson College.
Song of Ascent, Alison Folland, 2024 (work-in-progress), 16mm to digital, sound, b&w, English, 4:34
A short work-in-progress.
Alison Folland is a filmmaker and performer based in Somerville, MA. Her short hybrid films engage questions of affect and truth-value and are directly informed by her work as an actor in the commercial film industry. Alison studied physical theater at the Experimental Theater Wing at NYU/Tisch and film/video art at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Her films have been screened at festivals such as Athens International Film and Video Festival (Ohio), Athens International Film Festival (Greece), Antimatter (Victoria, BC), and Winnipeg Underground Film Festival. As a performer, Alison has worked with directors such as Gus Van Sant, Todd Haynes, Barbet Schroeder, and David O. Russell. She is a member of AgX Film Collective and teaches 16mm filmmaking at Emerson College.
What Leads Us to Ruin, Stefan Grabowski, 2024 (work-in-progress), 16mm and Super 8 to digital, sound, color and b&w, English, 36:28
A meditation on impermanence, loss, uncertainty and instability, What Leads Us to Ruin takes a poetic and deeply personal look at spaces of architectural decay in an attempt to better understand their allure and the meanings we ascribe to them. (This is a preview screening of work-in-progress.)
Stefan Grabowski is a founding member of the AgX Film Collective and programmer of the Balagan Film Series since 2011.
Blue Bird, Yue Hua, 2024, 16mm multi-projector expanded cinema performance, sound, color and b&w, English and Chinese, 18:00
Blue Bird is a multi 16mm projector performance of the journey of a bird’s soul to find its body, also a mesmerizing journey of self-discovery. The bird's journey mirrors my journey of searching for belonging and the quest for wholeness through a female and personal lens. Layered with evocative soundscapes and multilingual poems, the performance creates a liminal space where dreams and reality converge. Spoken word and poem elements engage the viewer in a thought-provoking dialogue, inspiring them to seek their own sense of “wholeness.”
Blue Bird is not only a kind of bird, but also a symbol of a group of people, who migrate and explore their identity, history, and memory.
Yue Hua/华越 is a filmmaker and multimedia artist, born and raised in Wuhu, China, currently based in Boston, MA. Her work delves into film, expanded cinema, and digital media, including projection, performance, installation, and production design. Yue’s art explores themes like spirit-body relationships, searching for belonging, and the female perspective. She holds a BFA from the China Academy of Art and an MFA in Film and Media Art from Emerson College.
PLEASE NOTE:
Masks are strongly encouraged at this event to help protect the most vulnerable among our community. If you are hoping to attend but feel that you need a specific accommodation of any sort, please do not hesitate to reach out to hi[at]agxfilm.org.