Cinema On the Verge: CineSpace Art Exhibition
Houston Cinema Arts Society are putting the city on the map as a premier showcase for the moving image and the creative process. The Cinema Arts Festival is one of their most ambitious programs. It is an eight day, multi venue festival which includes over 50 films, an interactive video installation gallery, live performances, panel discussions, workshops and free outdoor and student field trip screenings. In its relatively short history, HCAS has brought notable guest artists, such as Tilda Swinton, Alex Gibney, Guillermo Arriaga, Isabella Rossellini, John Turturro, Shirley MacLaine, Rick Linklater, Ethan Hawke, Fisher Stevens, Robert Redford, Tracy Letts, James Ivory, Julie Taymor, Will Forte, and Thomas Haden Church among many others, to the Festival.
This year’s “Cinema on the Verge” gallery exhibition features five artists, who explore outer space through video, photography, animation, and drawing. The exhibition is curated by Richard Herskowitz in collaboration with Lynne McCabe, director of She Works Flexible Gallery.
The exhibition will open on the 13th November and will be on until the 5th December
Opening Night: 13th November - 5pm-7pm
JEANNE LIOTTA
Jeanne Liotta makes films, videos, and other ephemera, including installed projections, works on paper, and photographic works. Her works encompass a constellation of mediums and interests often located at a lively intersection of art, science, and natural philosophy.
Gallery Exhibit: Dark Enough
Single-channel video projection. Collaboration with poet Lisa Gill, from her book Dark Enough. A virtual proscenium stage for the poetry to play itself upon.
Screening: Desired Constellations
Monday, November 16 - 8:00 P.M - Free
The Menil Collection
A program of short films curated and presented by Liotta, including works by Joseph Cornell, Hollis Frampton, and her own Observando el Cielo (2007), voted one of the top films of the decade by the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
LAURA HEIT
Laura Heit is an experimental filmmaker and performance artist who employs stop-motion, live-action puppetry, hand drawing, and computer animation in her works. Disquieting and evocative, her films and performances seamlessly cross genres to unfold poetic visual narratives. Heit employs a strong handmade aesthetic, an irreverent sense of humor, drawing, puppetry and animation, to bring together ideas and stories about phantoms, ghosts, love, loss, and invisibility.
Gallery Exhibit: Hypothetical Star: An Animation Diorama
A hand-drawn animated installation and film, utilizing microscopic and macroscopic imagery, Hypothetical Star invites viewers to imagine a star system too deep inside or too far away to see. Heit animates images photographed through a digital microscope overlaid with raw footage taken form the Apollo 12 mission. Her piece uses thrown shadows from tabletop dioramas and reflected and refracted animated projections to create a universe of hypothetical stars, moons, and planets.
Performance/Screening: Traveling Light: Animation and Matchbook Show
Sunday, November 15 - 8:00 P.M - Free
Brasil/She Works Flexible Courtyard
A program of handmade animations by Laura Heit and other animators, including Heit’s recent works utilizing NASA footage. Heit will end the evening with a 25-minute “Matchbook Show,” in which she performs a variety of puppet shows within matchboxes, projected behind her on a big screen.
JULIA OLDHAM
Julia Oldham weaves love stories out of the complexities of physics and math, the mating dances of insects, and chance encounters with wild animals in a forest. Oldham collaborates with scientists to tease out poetic and wondrous elements of physics and nature, which she then weaves into romantic fairy tales and myths in her video works, drawings, and songs.
Gallery Exhibit: Farewell Brave Voyager
Julia Oldham's installation of video, animation, music, and drawing memorializes three doomed space explorers: two fictional and one historical. In the video Farewell Brave Voyager, Oldham and her physicist father launch a robot named InfiniG into a distant black hole to research the effect of infinite gravity. In the animated piece Laika’s Lullaby, Oldham works with musician Lindsay Keast to tell the tragic story of the Soviet space dog Laika. The Loneliest Place is a drawing project that follows the journey of a robotic dog in space, who is developing a method for escaping a spinning black hole.
Screening: Star Noise: Recent Videos by Julia Oldham
Sunday, November 15 - 3:00 P.M - Free
She Works Flexible Gallery
Video artist Julia Oldham’s characters are on sensuous journeys through scientific and mathematical worlds. A woman engages in increasingly odd mathematical tasks as she chases after the infinite; a bereft researcher weeps for the loss of a black hole research probe; Laika the Soviet space dog floats into orbit and takes in the vast loneliness of space. In this program, the artist will talk about growing up with a physicist dad and her current obsession with science and love followed by a screening of four short videos. Oldham will screen Laika’s Lullaby (6:30), Farewell Brave Voyager (4:39), Star Noise (8:47), and Infinitely Impossible (10:30).
KELLY SEARS
The Drift (2007)
A mysterious disappearance during a late 1960s space journey entrances the nation. The ensuing search for the lost astronauts radically changes the nature of the country. This film reexamines the nature of the United States’ expansionist doctrines and the desire to push too far, too fast.
DAVID JANESKO
Deep Sky Objects photo series (2012)
All of the lights in Janesko’s apartment were mapped on a 3D coordinate system and photographed from the apartment's center of gravity, which was located inside his bedroom closet. Each light was cataloged using notation based on the New General Catalog, an astronomical catalog of known star clusters, nebulae and galaxies, their 3D location, and light bulb manufacturer specs. Janesko used a single element convex lens cutout of a quartz crystal to photograph the lights. Lights not visible from the closet were photographed using a series of mirrors, which directed the lights into the camera.