This is your last chance to use words
Screening and Performance
Saturday, February 22 at 7pm
Join us for a screening of works by Will Benedict, Jesse Chun, Akinola Davies Jr., Rindon Johnson, Sara Magenheimer, and Jessica Wilson. The screening program is followed by Like Clockwork, a performance by Sara Magenheimer.
Will Benedict, Degrees of Disgust, 2019, video, 5:00 min
Jesse Chun, WORKBOOK, 2018, single-channel video, 7:23 min
Akinola Davies Jr., In Memory Of, 2019, video, 7:31 min
Rindon Johnson, Some Laws of Large Numbers (Asshole Love Poems), video, 2020, 3:02 min
Sara Magenheimer, Art and Theft, 2017, HD video with sound, 7:22 min
Jessica Wilson, Smile Driver, 2019, CG animation, 7:56 min
This program is organized by Sara Magenheimer and Rachel Valinsky in conjunction with the release of Magenheimer’s new book, Beige Pursuit, published by Wendy’s Subway (New York) in 2019. Special thanks to Baptiste Pinteaux, Pascaline Morincome, and Olga Rozenblum at Treize.
Image caption: Still from Sara Magenheimer, Art and Theft, 2017, HD video with sound, 7:22 min. Courtesy of the artist.
Program Notes
Will Benedict, Degrees of Disgust, 2019, video, 5:00 min
Degrees of Disgust follows a dominatrix Uber Eats driver as she considers the political forces and historical events that have brought her to this point. The voiceover taken from Jia Tolentino’s book Trick Mirror, confronts our culture’s endless drive towards “self-optimisation” and, as the writer states, the position that women find themselves in when "trying to organize their lives around practices they find ridiculous and possibly even indefensible".
Jesse Chun, WORKBOOK, 2018, single-channel video, 7:23 min
WORKBOOK employs mistranslation as an active tool for poetics -- using it to decenter the world's "common language," English, through a multilingual and non-linear perspectives. Working with found EFL (English as a Foreign Language) pedagogy, tutorials, and standardized tests, WORKBOOK considers new translations that reflect on diaspora, interiority, and the untranslatable.
Akinola Davies Jr., In Memory Of, 2019, video, 7:31 min
In memory of looks at the oral transmission of knowledge between generations through a matriarchal portrait of Akinola Davies Jr.’s family. The artist immerses us in an intimate and personal space with a background of gospel and traditional music.
Director: Akinola Davies Jr.
Editor: Daisy Ifama
Sound design: Dutch E. Germ
Color: Danial Thompson
Rindon Johnson, Some Laws of Large Numbers (Asshole Love Poems), video, 2020, 3:02 min
First published on a limited edition broadside titled “Buttholes 4 Cheap” (produced in collaboration with artist Jordan Strafer and printed by Inpatient Press for their 2020 Newsbox Residency), the poem recited and close-captioned in this video explores desire, intimacy, and the lure of the asshole.
Sara Magenheimer, Art and Theft, 2017, HD video with sound, 7:22 min
Magenheimer’s video explores the bounds of narrative and the illusion of received wisdom in the seven minutes and twenty-two seconds it takes to rob a house. Here, images of medieval art, popular cinema, and “live” news reportage speak candidly to the constructedness of all storytelling traditions. Voice over narration by Magenheimer.
Jessica Wilson, Smile Driver, 2019, CG Animation, 7:56 min
Real and virtual bodies alike express through animation: a smile, stutter, twitch, or a twinge all realize intangible internal dynamics, unseen animating forces that carry recognizable meaning when embodied. In Smile Driver, a nexus of CG characters share the same body, but are rendered discrete from one another by image and motion files that they absorb. In CG animation, abstract data are the origins and the medium of expression: images parsed by light and color information and movement by spatial parameters bring the static to life, rendering data legible when transposed to image. The abstract data is sourced from all over the internet. The surfaces and volumes featured are animated by hundreds of images from unknown authors, unknown bodies that upload their motion data onto the internet, becoming the expression of collective enunciations that contaminate the work and its surroundings. The work encourages a sensitivity to the flow between abstract data, image, and physical sensation, proposing a virtual space that finds its expression in physical sensation.
Followed by Clockwork (2017), a performance by Sara Magenheimer.
First presented at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Clockwork is a collaboration with Joseph Williams (Motion Graphics, FKA Twigs), featuring soundscapes and vocal textures based on “Like Clockwork,” a text by Magenheimer which she narrates. When performed live as a duo, Williams processes Magenheimer’s vocals in real time, creating multi-vocal harmonic layering and merging Magenheimer’s voice with synthesized language.
Artists
WILL BENEDICT (B. 1978, Los Angeles) lives and works in Paris. The artist’s upcoming and recent exhibitions include the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2020, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, iwillmedievalfutureyou1, Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2019), A Womb with a View, dépendance, Brussels (2019), I AM A PROBLEM, MMK, Frankfurt am Main (2018), New Video and Painting, Balice Hertling, Paris (2018), Recent Video, Overduin & Co., Los Angeles (2018), Fiction is a Terrible Enemy, Fondazione Giuliani, Rome (2017), Law and Order, Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong (2016) and Corruption Feeds, Bergen Kunsthall (2014).
JESSE CHUN (b. 1984) is an artist based in New York. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include SculptureCenter; Queens Museum; The Drawing Center; BAM; Bronx Museum of the Arts; Oakville Galleries, among others. Select awards and commissions include Triple Canopy; the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship at ISCP; The Drawing Center's Open Sessions; BRIC Media Arts Fellowship; Bronx Museum AIM; and a solo public commission at the Brooklyn Bridge Park. Her publications include Intangible Heritage (Wendy's Subway x BAM, 2018); Blueprints (Silent Face Projects, 2017); and Valid From Until (Booklyn Press, 2016). Select public collections include the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Artist Book Collection; Cleveland Clinic Art Collection; the Smithsonian Institution, Archive of American Art; Yale University Library; Asia Art Archive in America, and more. Chun's work has been reviewed in Artforum, the Brooklyn Rail, Asia Literary Review, Art21, the Wall Street Journal, ArtAsiaPacific, and BOMB.
AKINOLA OGUNMADE-DAVIES JR. is a multi-disciplinary filmmaker, writer, and video artist. His work is located between West Africa and the UK, as he identifies as a member of the global diaspora who is situated within the margins of both worlds. Akinola tries to delicately navigate the collision of both colonial and imperial tradition, whilst advocating a return to indigenous narratives. He explores themes of community, race, spirituality, identity, and gender, telling the stories that bridge the gap between traditional and millennial communities. These themes come with a duality: that of necessity and urgency in regards to the medium of storytelling.
There is a large emphasis on the necessity for clear intention in concepts and a willingness to experiment with form: preparation and meticulous research for his films assume a central role and are critical to his image manufacturing. He draws from aspects of collective and individual memory and lived experience.
RINDON JOHNSON is an artist and writer. His most recent virtual reality film, Meat Growers: A Love Story, was commissioned by Rhizome (New York) and Tentacular (Madrid). He is the author of Nobody Sleeps Better Than White People (Inpatient Press, 2016), the virtual reality book, Meet in the Corner (Publishing-House.Me, 2017) and most recently, Shade the King (Capricious, 2017). He lives in Berlin and is an Associate Fellow at the Universität der Künste Berlin, Centre for Advanced Studies in Arts and Sciences, where he writes about Virtual Reality.
Working across a range of media including video, sound, performance, sculpture, collage, and installation, New York-based artist SARA MAGENHEIMER disrupts, manipulates, and defamiliarizes language with bold combinations of image and text. Her videos incorporate traditional filmic editing techniques alongside those inspired by music and collage. In syncopated progressions of pictures and words, Magenheimer pushes against the bounds of narrative, charting circuitous storylines through vernacular associations that invite individual interpretations. Recent solo exhibitions include The New Museum, New York (2018), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR (2017); The Kitchen, New York (2017); Chapter NY (2017): Art in General in partnership with kim?, Riga, Latvia (2016); the Center for Ongoing Research & Projects (COR&P), Columbus, OH (2016); JOAN, Los Angeles (2015); and Recess, New York (2015). Her videos have been screened at the Flaherty Seminar (2019), International Film Festival Rotterdam (2018), Brooklyn Academy of Music (2017); the New York Film Festival (2017, 2015, 2014); Images Festival, Toronto (2018, 2017, 2016, 2015); Anthology Film Archives, New York (2016); EMPAC, Troy, NY (2016); and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2015).
JESSICA WILSON (b. 1991) is an artist who lives and works in NYC.
On Thursday, February 20, at 7pm, book launch at After 8 Books
Of Sara Magenheimer, Beige Pursuit
With readings by Magenheimer, Claire Finch, Émilie Notéris, and Barbara Sirieix
