Ben Russell is a media artist and curator whose films, installations, and performances foster a deep engagement with the history and semiotics of the moving image. Formal investigations of the historical and conceptual relationships between early cinema, documentary practices, and structuralist filmmaking result in immersive experiences concerned at once with ritual, communal spectatorship and the pursuit of a “psychedelic ethnography.”
A 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship and 2010 FIPRESCI award recipient, Ben has had solo screenings and exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Viennale, and the Museum of Modern Art. He began the Magic Lantern screening series in Providence, Rhode Island, was co-director of the artist-run space BEN RUSSELL in Chicago, IL, has toured worldwide with film/ video/ performance programs and was named by Cinemascope in 2012 as one of the “50 Best Filmmakers Under 50.” Ben lives between Los Angeles and Paris, France.
For the past 28 years, Deidi von Schaewen has traveled in India, immersing herself in its people and culture, and exploring themes through her photography and video. For her series on the Sacred Trees, she traveled the length and breadth of India. The exhibition in Evergreen Gallery is an opportunity to view these lush, complex images in large-scale, to be surrounded by their energy and power.Born in Berlin, von Schaewen studied painting at the Berlin Academy of Arts before deciding to concentrate on photography and film. Currently she is based in Paris. She has exhibited extensively throughout Europe, India, North Africa, and the US. Twenty books of her photographs have been published, with one about Sacred Trees of India due out next year. A continuing obsession of hers is to capture on film the ephemeral, aspects of our urban and rural civilizations that are temporary, fleeting, or vanishing with time. For the Sacred Trees of India, it is more a revelation of devotion and accumulation over time, the ability of trees to survive, rejuvenate, transform – in India, trees are not only sacred to the gods, they can actually BE gods.
Evergreen Gallery is extremely pleased to announce the fall exhibition, Sacred Trees of India: Photographs by Deidi von Schaewen. The exhibition in Evergreen Gallery is an opportunity to view these lush, complex images in large-scale, to be surrounded by their energy and power.
Von Schaewen was director of photography for a feature film by Robert Cordier in 1972 – a time when it was unusual for a woman to be in that position. She continued as director of photography on other films, and in 1978 she began writing and directing her own films. One of her films, Sravanabelgola, will be showing in Evergreen Gallery as part of the exhibition.
Opening Wed. Oct. 8, 5-7pm Exhibition continues through Dec. 3
Naima Lowe is a 34 year old Queer, African-American artist and educator based in Olympia, WA. Her films, videos, performances and writings have been seen at the Athens International Film and Video Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archive, The Knitting Factory, The Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific Islander Experience, The Stella Elkins Tyler Gallery, The International Toy Theater Exhibition, and Judson Memorial Church.
Her first film “Birthmarks” was a Student Academy Awards Finalist, won Best Experimental Film at the Newark Black Film Festival and was honored for Best Sound Design in the NextFrame International Student Film Festival. Her collaborative performance and installation Mary and Sarah and You and Me made its New York debut at the historic Judson Memorial Church.
Naima has been recently working with letterpress printing, hand made 16mm film, and other forms of archaic producible visual media. Her 40 page, limited edition, looseleaf book Thirty-Nine (39) Questions for WHITE PEOPLE was shown at the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle from May-November 2013.
Pam Minty and Alain LeTourneau present their 2011 film Empty Quarter on Wednesday May 30, 2012, 11:30-1:30, in Lecture Hall 1 at The Evergreen State College.
Empty Quarter (2011, 16mm black & white/sound, 71 minutes) is a film about the region of Southeast Oregon, an area populated by ranching and farming communities, in Lake, Harney, and Malheur counties. The region is roughly one-third of Oregon’s landmass yet holds less than 2% of the state’s population.
Southeast Oregon, though familiar by name, is a foreign place, particularly to those who reside in urban environments. It is a landscape in the making, constantly undergoing change, being re-worked. It is a highly politicized landscape, evoking differing opinions concerning resource management and land use. It is also a landscape that is, despite some beliefs, rich with diversity, as seen by the presence of East Indian and Japanese families, ancestors of Basque sheepherders, home to the Paiute tribes people, and to Latinos who have come to help work the land.
Empty Quarter departs from a documentary form that utilizes “talking head” interviews and “B-roll” or “cut-away” images tied together with occasional narration. The film instead presents stark portraits, waiting to be explored and digested by the viewer. Meaning is extracted in the slow process of accumulation and measured response. Through a series of stationary shots, recording open landscapes and the activities of local residents, Empty Quarter reflects on the character of the region. Natural areas are viewed among images of industry, various labor processes, resource management and recreation. Voices of local residents describe the history of pioneer settlement, social life of rural communities and the struggles of small town economies.
Pam Minty and Alain LeTourneau are media artists based in Portland, Oregon. They are the co-founders of 40frames.org, a 16mm film preservation and advocacy organization that maintains the web resource 16mmdirectory.org, houses a collection of 16mm prints, and provides a menu of technical services to media artists and organizations.
Empty Quarter is their first co-production, and has been exhibited at venues and festivals throughout North America, including the Film Studies Center at the University of Chicago, Margaret Mead Film Festival, and the Vancouver International Film Centre. Minty and LeTourneau are currently at work on new projects scheduled for release winter 2013.
Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which recently celebrated its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. Helvetica has been shown at over 200 film festivals, museums, design conferences, and cinemas worldwide.
Thom Andersen has lived in Los Angeles for most of his life. In the 1960s, he made short films, including Melting (1965), Olivia’s Place (1966), and — ——- (1967, with Malcolm Brodwick). In 1974 he completed Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer, an hour-long documentation of Muybridge’s photographic work. In 1995, with Noël Burch, he completed Red Hollywood, a videotape about the filmwork created by the victims of the Hollywood Blacklist. Their work on the history of the Blacklist also produced a book, Les Communistes de Hollywood: Autre chose que des martyrs, published in 1994. In 2003 he completed Los Angeles Plays Itself, a videotape about the representation of Los Angeles in movies. It won the National Film Board of Canada Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 2003 Vancouver International Film Festival, and it was voted best documentary of 2004 in the Village Voice Film Critics’ Poll. He has taught film composition at the California Institute of the Arts since 1987.Andersen is also one of the preeminent film educators in the United States, teaching at Cal Arts in Los Angeles where he has lived for most of his life. However his own films are largely unknown except for his 2003 award-winning portrait of Los Angeles, Los Angeles Plays Itself, voted best documentary of 2004 in the Village Voice Film Critics’ Poll.
Carolina Silva (b. 1975, Madrid, Spain) lives and works in Seattle. She uses installation, drawing, animation and film to contemplate the body and the passage of time through both figurative and abstract work. Her last show at Lawrimore Project entitled, Against Gravity, was part of a series of shows called Has Art? where each month, artists are paired with a writer and a page from Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés.
Carolina has had one-person shows in 2010: Galeria Travesia Cuatro, Madrid; La Conservera Center for Contemporary Art, Murcia, Spain (with Lili Duourie, Elena del Rivero, and Lily van der Stokker), (catalog); 2007: La Casa Encendida, Madrid. 2006: Galería Travesía Cuatro, Madrid; Art Space Tetra, Fukoa, Japan. 2004: Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco. 2003: Fish Tank Gallery, New York. 2002: Next Gallery, New York. Her work has also been seen in 2009: Explum, Puerto Lumbrera; Becas Generación 2008, Madrid; Doméstico09, Madrid, 2009. 2008: IVAM, Valencia; Museo de Pollença; Casal Solleric, Palma de Mallorca. 2007: Planes Futuros. Baluarte, Pamplona; Aquí y Ahora, Sala Alcalá 31, Madrid; Destino Futuro, Jardín Botánico, Madrid. 2004: The Line Up. Walter and McBean Galleries, San Francisco.
Deborah Stratman is a Chicago-based artist and filmmaker interested in landscapes and systems. Her films, rather than telling stories, pose a series of problems – and through their at times ambiguous nature, allow for a complicated reading of the questions being asked. She has exhibited internationally at venues including the Whitney Biennial, MoMA, the Pompidou, Hammer Museum and many international film festivals including Sundance, the Viennale, Ann Arbor and Rotterdam. She is the recipient of Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships and she currently teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Free to the public.
A free screening of “O’er the Land” will be held on Tuesday, February 8th at 8pm at the Northern in downtown Olympia.
Marilyn Freeman is an interdisciplinary, process- and time-based artist living in Olympia, Washington. Her work is characterized by themes of identity, tolerance, faith and alienation. Baptism is the first in a series of autobiographic essays and installations about growing up Catholic. Freeman’s contemplative film work, collectively entitled, CinemaDivina, is screened in spirituality centers as well as film and arts venues. Freeman’s experimental feature film, Group, distributed by Frameline, was released on DVD in 2009 following its 2002 theatrical run and extended educational market release. In addition to numerous accolades for directing and producing, Freeman has received financial support from The Arch & Bruce Brown Foundation, Centrum, and the Washington State Artist Trust in the form of a Media Arts Fellowship and a Gap Grant for her screenplay, Sophisticated: The Hollywood Story of Miss Dorothy Arzner. Freeman’s film, Meeting Magdalene (1995), played festivals worldwide and led to her short story collection, Meeting Magdalene (Naiad Press, 1996). Presently, Freeman is in post-production with The R Word, a feature-length documentary about the self-advocacy movement of people with developmental disabilities. She holds a BFA in Theater from the Cornish College of the Arts and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College. She is a Visiting Artist at The Evergreen State College and cofounder of the media arts studio, Wovie.
