Evening with Michael Gitlin

Wednesday, April 10
7-9 PM
Cinema Balash

GITLIN ON GITLIN

My early films and videos were most often engaged with teasing apart the

mechanics of narrative. This period of my work culminated in the short feature, Berenice

(1996), which is very loosely adapted from the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name and

was included in the 1997 Whitney Biennial Exhibition. Other projects involve a more purely

formal experimentation, such as Shudder (top and bottom) (2001) and Dust Studies (2010),

which premiered in the Views from the Avant-garde section of the 2010 New York Film

Festival. The main body of my work for more than a decade has been a series of research-

based experimental essay films that examine American social or cultural phenomena. This

set of projects began in 2000 with the short video, Nine Guided Tours, about

commercialized cave tours in Pennsylvania, and has continued since then with a series of

long-form pieces. The Birdpeople (2004), which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in

2005 and was acquired by the museum for its permanent collection in 2007, investigates

the social construction of nature, centered on ornithology and its amateur counterpart,

birdwatching. The Earth Is Young (2009), for which I was awarded a Guggenheim

Fellowship in 2006, is an examination of the rhetorical strategies and re-contextualized

natural history imagery employed by Young Earth Creationists, counter-pointed with images

of the slow and patient work of conventional paleontologists. I’m currently working on two

related long-form projects simultaneously: one project is an experimental essay, somewhat

similar formally to my previous work, that examines certain literary, philosophical and

political aspects of delusional thought in schizophrenia, calibrated at scales ranging from

the personal to the social; the other project is an observational film that I’ve been shooting

for the past year-and-a-half at an art space located on the grounds of a state-run psychiatric

hospital. This film is a portrait of a semi-autonomous community operating in the face of a

repressive system, and explores the reparative function that creative activity has for the

members of that community. These new projects build on themes developed in the earlier

films, which are, at their root, epistemological inquiries that ask, “What do we think we know

and how do we organize that knowledge?” The new projects, with their investigations of

non-normative mental states, continue this inquiry by exploring the space between the

interior realm where private meaning is made resonant and exterior systems where shared

meanings are validated.

BIO

Michael Gitlin’s 2010 HD project, Dust Studies, had its premiere as part of the Views

from the Avant-Garde section of the 2010 New York Film Festival. His previous work has

been screened at numerous venues, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York,

the Toronto International Film Festival, the Full Frame Documentary Festival, the

London Film Festival and the Whitney Biennial Exhibition. His 16mm film, The

Birdpeople (61 minutes, 2004), is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern

Art in New York. Gitlin was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006. His work

has also been supported by the Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council on the

Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Gitlin received an M.F.A. from Bard

College. He teaches at Hunter College in New York City.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 17TH – KATYA GROKHOVSKY LECTURE AND Q&A

http://www.katyagrokhovsky.net

KATYA GROKHOVSKY lecture and Q&A
Wednesday, October 17th
6:30pm- 7:30pm
2nd Floor Lounge, Hunter MFA Building
OPEN TO ENTIRE HUNTER COMMUNITY

BIO:
Based in Brooklyn, New York and Melbourne, Australia, Ukrainian born, Australian artist Katya Grokhovsky works across disciplines including performance, video, installation, photography, sculpture, drawing and text. She has an MFA in Sculpture (2011) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA, a BFA in Painting (2007) from Victorian College of the Arts, Australia and a BA (Honors, 2000) in Fashion from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia. Grokhovsky’s work has been widely exhibited in Australia, USA and Europe. She has traveled extensively, partaking in numerous residencies and performance art events and received various awards and scholarships. Grokhovsky’s work has been shown in venues such as Watermill Center, NY, Chashama, NYC, Ukrainian Institute of America, NYC, Pool Art Fair, NYC, Fountain Art Fair, NYC, Gallery 151, NYC, Fowler Arts Collective, Brooklyn, Museum of Russian Art, Jersey City, New Jersey City University Gallery, Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn, The Bedroom, Brooklyn, Cue Foundation, NYC, Chelsea Art Museum, NYC, Galerie Protege, NYC, Santa Fe Art Institute, New Mexico, Defibrillator gallery, Chicago, Sullivan Gallery , Chicago, Zhou B Art Center, Chicago, Heaven gallery, Chicago, Boomerang Space, Chicago, Het Wilde Weten, Rotterdam, Performing Arts Forum, France, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne, Australia, Bus Projects, Melbourne, Australia, ODESSA gallery, Melbourne, Australia, Conduit Arts, Australia, COFA space, Sydney, Australia, Phoenix gallery, Melbourne Australia, George Paton gallery, Melbourne Australia and many more.

Artist statement:
Grokhovsky’s practice is interdisciplinary and research – based. A sense of ongoing profound geographical and cultural displacement pervades all of her work with which she explores the personal-public and private-political of a female body. Themes of labor, time and endurance stem from her own experience of life as a woman in the East and West under different political regimes. Past ideals, societal stereotypes, desires as well as current ideological and economic states intertwine onto an emotionally charged, artistic platform, on which she tends to operate. Conditions of being are collaged from vast collected materials.

Grokhovsky explores the languages of cultural clichés, dance, art history, cinematic genres, feminist theory, social media and pop culture. She investigates the idea of fashion through the lens of the feminist space of protest. The terrain of the female living under sexist and gendered patriarchy is analyzed, critiqued and observed via multidisciplinary combinations of various media, making up a complex landscape of complete environments. Often involving live durational and sometimes participatory performative elements and actions. Post-performance, post-eventual residue and ephemera is often exhibited and in itself re-constructed and created as evidential presence.

 

Wednesday, October 10th – galería perdida lecture and Q&A

galería perdida lecture and Q&A
Wednesday, October 10th
6:30pm- 7:30pm
2nd Floor Lounge, Hunter MFA Building
OPEN TO ENTIRE HUNTER COMMUNITY

galería perdida is a collective multi-disciplinary practice established in 2005. The cooperative employs various media including films, photography, and sculpture as well as utilizing curatorial projects to observe slippages across cross-cultural and historical platforms. Recent exhibitions include La Carne de Burro No Es Transparente at the Luckman Gallery, Los Angeles; Matryoshka at Recess Activities, NY, all we ever wanted was everything at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, NY and the upcoming The New World at the Wignall Museum. They are currently based in Brooklyn, NY.

 “The buildings stand one beside the other. They form a straight line. They are expected to form a line, and it’s a serious defect in them when they don’t do so. They are then said to be ‘subject to alignment’, meaning that they can by rights be demolished, so as to be rebuilt in a straight line with the others.”

www.galeriaperdida.com

Visiting Artists – TOMORROW!!! Don Porcella & Ginger Shulick

When: 3/21
When: Luncheon at 12pm, crits following at 1pm
Where: Luncheon in the 6th Floor lounge

CONTACT digtl.hunter@gmail.com NOW to reserve.

Bio:
Don Porcella, Born and raised in Modesto, California, Don Porcella’s artwork has been exhibited at galleries in New York City, Berlin, Paris, Copenhagen, East Hampton, Washington D.C., Miami and San Francisco. Porcella’s art has been reviewed in the New York Times, NY ARTS, Fiber Arts Magazine, Chelsea Now, San Francisco Magazine and the Village Voice to name a few. He has a BA in Psychology from the University of California at San Diego, a BFA from California College of Arts and Crafts and an MFA from Hunter College in New York. Porcella’s work is included in public and private collections across the United States and Europe. Porcella has received grants from the Council on the Arts and Humanities for Staten Island, the Brooklyn Arts Council, and an Emerging Artist Fellowship from Socrates Sculpture Park. Porcella is the current artist-in-residence at the Museum of Arts and Design.

Inspired by nature, consumer culture, and science fiction, Porcella’s work is highly-reflective of his upbringing; his artist mother and physician father made almost everything by hand, which can be seen in his art that celebrates craft, the hand-made, and folk and outsider art. Porcella’s interest in nature and human evolution came from exploring the Sierra Nevada wilderness. Now living and working in NYC, Porcella seems to be recalling his earlier experiences in an animalistic call of the wild. By creating paintings, sculpture, drawings and installations from materials such as handmade wax and woven pipe cleaners, Porcella seeks to transform these low-brow materials and elevate them to a high art context, while simultaneously laughing at the human condition and presenting a unique world that is shamelessly awkward and unabashedly comical. Porcella’s work often references art historical movements, America’s rampant consumerism, and alien conspiracy theories, which allows the subjective and strange to penetrate humorous representations of a wildly imaginative reality.

Ginger Shulick Porcella, has more than ten years of arts administration experience, including a successful history of development for arts organizations and individual artists. Porcella is currently the Director of Strategic Initiatives for Art Connects New York and its Spattered Columns Exhibition Space in SoHo, which shows work of NYC-based visual artists without commercial gallery representation. She has previously worked as the Managing Director of Flux Factory in Queens and as the Director of Grants and Community Programming at the Council on the Arts and Humanities for Staten Island. Porcella has curated a number of exhibitions such as: “LUMEN”, an international video and performance art festival; “Ivory Tower”, a video exhibition concurrent with 2011 Art Basel Miami Beach; “The Typhoon Continues and So Do You”, a multi-media exhibition in response to artifacts of war; and “Boys to Men”, a traveling photography exhibition featuring the work of Time Magazine’s Deputy Photo Editor Paul Moakley. Porcella lectures frequently on a variety of topics, including panels specific to performance and video art across New York City and abroad. Porcella is a recent recipient of a National Arts Strategies Fellowship for Emerging Arts Leaders, and holds a M.A. in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University and a B.A. in Art History from DePaul University.