BRAKHAGE SYMPOSIUM /  by melinda shopsin

I was an invited guest at the 2016 Brakhage Center Symposium: A Tribute to George Kuchar
held at the University of Colorado Boulder on March 4, 5 and 6. My program featured rarely screened class productions staged by Kuchar at the San Francisco Art Institute, School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Cal Arts. In addition, I moderated a panel featuring Nancy Andrews, Denah Johnston, Donna Kerness and Mike Kuchar.

Mike Kuchar and Nancy Andrews

Mike Kuchar and Nancy Andrews

THE HOT SEAT @ TRANS-PECOS /  by melinda shopsin

THE HOT SEAT is my new talk show. It isn't a podcast, it's not being streamed, it won't be broadcast. I ask my special invited guests a lot of questions. There is a theme song and a monologue. It happens live. Tonight marks the world premiere.

Feb 4th, 2016
8PM Doors, 9PM Kickoff
@ Trans Pecos (915 Wyckoff Ave, Ridgewood Queens)

• Sergei Tcherepnin/Woody Sullender
http://murrayguy.com/sergei-tcherepnin/works/
http://www.woodysullender.com/

• Andrew Lampert
http://www.andrewlampert.com/

• Cecilia López
http://www.cecilia-lopez.com/

DRAWING CENTER WITH OKKYUNG LEE /  by melinda shopsin

Okkyung Lee (composer, cellist) and Andrew Lampert (artist, filmmaker)
premiere their new audio-visual hybrid performance WANTS AND DESIRES .

Friday, January 29 at 7:30pm
THE DRAWING CENTER
35 Wooster Street, New York, NY, 10013
1 212 219 2166
$10 at BrownPaperTickets.com

Okkyung Lee and Andrew Lampert

Okkyung Lee and Andrew Lampert

Fridays and Saturdays in late January and early February, The Drawing Center will present Basement Performances curated by renowned composer and performer John Zorn. The six cutting edge multi-media performances in our Lab will bring together improvised music with expanded cinema and feature some of Downtown New York’s most adventurous musicians and visual artists including: Okkyung Lee and Andrew Lampert; Raha Raissnia and Panagiotis Mavridis; Bill Laswell; Kenny Wollesen and Julia Elsas; Ela Troyano and Uzi Parnes; and Ikue Mori.

The Basement Performances are produced by Brett Littman, Executive Director.

Saturday, January 30 at 7:30pm
Raha Raissnia (artist) and Panagiotis Mavridis (artist, musical instrument maker)

Friday, February 5 at 7:30pm
Bill Laswell (record producer, bassist)

Saturday, February 6 at 7:30pm
Kenny Wollesen (percussionist) and Julia Elsas (artist)

Friday, February 12 at 7:30pm
Ela Troyano (filmmaker, actress) and Uzi Parnes (photographer, performer)

Saturday, February 13 at 7:30pm
Ikue Mori (improviser, composer)

ALBUQUERQUE /  by melinda shopsin

ALBUQUERQUE (2015)
premiering in the exhibit NEVER TWICE
at Mircoscope Gallery
Performance on Sunday December 20, 2015 @ 7PM

Microscope is extremely pleased to present “Never Twice”, an exhibition of live moving image performance in the context of what is usually referred to as expanded cinema: works free from the constraints or presenting alternatives to the traditional theatrical screening setting – single projection on a screen before an audience. The title of the exhibit, a reference to the quote from Heraclitus “one cannot step into the same river twice”, emphasizes the ephemeral character of this art form, one always intrinsically connected to a “here” and “now”, a multi-sensorial experience that although it may be performed again, it cannot ever be replicated.

“Never Twice” features eight New York artists recognized for their extensive work with this performative practice, many for decades, including Ken Jacobs, who participated in the “Festival of Expanded Cinema” as it was described on the poster for the event 50 years ago at the Filmmakers’ Cinemathèque run by Jonas Mekas. In some cases, other terms were or are preferred by the artists to describe their works such as “paracinema”, as used by Jacobs, or “contracted cinema” as presented by Bradley Eros.

The exhibit will unfold over the course of the month with gallery hours 1pm to 6pm Friday through Monday during which the artists have the option to be present to set up or take down equipment, rehearse and engage in other activities around their live performances on that Sunday night. On Mondays the remnants of the previous night’s performances will be on view.
Among new works in the exhibit are Black Space by Ken Jacobs, a 3-part work in which the audience, seated in total darkness, is guided by the artist’s voice until surround sound and strobe flashes take over; Barbara Hammer’s Outside/In, where the artist armed with portable projectors moves about the space aiming at an inflated balloon and the artist’s collage that incorporate personal photographs and medical x-rays; and Lary 7′s performance involving 35mm film loops loaded on his ”Yeep-yop” machine, an open projector tipped on its side in which the shutter opens only when the film advances, causing light bursts and syncing mishaps.

Other new works include an untitled performance by Andrew Lampert using video and broken films in broken projectors; Bradley Eros’ Screens <>, a projection based performance and installation made of colored gels, defraction grating, mylar, glass, to be viewed from both sides and in relation to Duchamp’s 1918 “To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour”; and a performance and installation work by Joel Schlemowitz An Alchemic Amalgam presenting triptychs of projections in 35mm slides, 16mm film, magic lantern and overhead projector with images sourced from alchemy illustrations, moiré patterns, science films and new footage shot and developed at the gallery during the preceding days, all with live electronic accompaniment by Enrique Paoli.

Also on view are Bruce McClure’s performance for shoeless projector previously presented in Paris at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Textiles Through the Ages (2014), involving a found 16mm film projected through an Eiki projector from which the artist has removed film shoe and bracket assembly to allow the filmstrip to be pulled in front of the aperture completely disengaged, and “Aldebaran” by Rose Kallal, featuring original 16mm film loops containing imagery of video synthesis, film and computer animation accompanied by a live modular synth score.

A round table discussion about the practice of expanded cinema as well as its definition both historically and today, will be held on Monday January 4th, 7:30pm at the gallery. Several of the exhibited artists will be joining the discussion, as well as other guests TBA.


MOBY DICK /  by melinda shopsin

I was invited to the Whitney Museum of American Art on November 14, 2015 to participate in MOBY DICK: A MARATHON READING. The entire Herman Melville novel was read over the course of two days in the space of Frank Stella's retrospective exhibition.


THE SCREAM HOUSE: NEW COMPOSITIONS 2015 at Issue Project Room /  by melinda shopsin

ISSUE PROJECT ROOM presents:
Andrew Lampert: The Scream House, Compositions 2015
Monday, October 19, 2015
8:00pm
$15 General, $12 Members / Students, $0 All-Access Members

Andrew Lampert presents a collection of new and recent pieces from his deep back catalog of films, videos, and performances. A rover between mediums who favors formal structures and humorous ruptures, Lampert’s slippery live shows disrupt expectations of concept and execution, intention and results. This evening is built around a number of new instruction-based performances, combining elements of predetermined structure, and improvisation. Among the works presented is a new entry in Lampert's unruly Projector Destruction series, a piece involving a telephone, a new video, and— to give fair warning— a piece requiring audience participation.

Photo by Greg Pierce.

Photo by Greg Pierce.

PRELUDE IN ANGER at Peephole Cinema/UnionDocs /  by melinda shopsin

Peephole Cinema presents
SPACETIME SINGULARITIES
guest curated by Elle Burchill and Andrea Monti (Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn)

Opening reception/BBQ on Friday, July 24th, 7:30 PM 
@ UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art
322 Union Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11211

SPACETIME SINGULARITIES is a program of new moving image works made for the occasion of Peephole Cinema by Bradley Eros, Sarah Halpern and Andrew Lampert. The works, hand shot by each artist in the darkness – of a cave, a nightclub and on the streets of NYC in the wee morning hours – collapse sensations and sounds into a single focus viewing experience in which stalactites appear as sonograms, Kenneth Anger conducts a ceremony on the theremin, and liquid nitrogen tanks become ticking time bombs in the city’s rain-slicked streets. – EB & AM

Peephole Cinema is a “miniature cinema” collective with satellite projects in three cities: San Francisco, Brooklyn, and Los Angeles. In each city, silent film shorts are screened 24/7 through a dime-sized peephole installed in a public location that can be visited anytime day or night. 

 

PRELUDE IN ANGERSuper 8mm transferred to digital, color, silent, 1 minute 50 seconds.

PRELUDE IN ANGER
Super 8mm transferred to digital, color, silent, 1 minute 50 seconds.

ALL MAGIC SANDS/CHAPPAQUA at Spectacle Theater, Brooklyn /  by melinda shopsin

The intrepid programmers at Spectacle have chosen to unleash the full brunt of my feature length double epic ALL MAGIC SANDS/CHAPPAQUA on the public as part of their commendable tribute to the singular Ornette Coleman. The only other public screening that I'm aware of occurred at the International Rotterdam Film Festival in 2013 to an unprepared and irritable audience. Will the local crowd be better equipped to handle the collision of free jazz with endless outtakes from an unfinished film starring children, a donkey and a some sort of Jesus guy stuck on an island? There will be three chances to find out!

SATURDAY, JULY 18 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, JULY 20 – 10:00 PM
WEDNESDAY, JULY 22 – 7:30 PM – FILMMAKER IN ATTENDANCE!

Spectacle is located at 124 South 3rd Street, Brooklyn, New York, between Bedford Avenue and Berry Street.

JAZZY FOR JOE at BAM CINEMAFEST /  by melinda shopsin

JAZZY FOR JOE
by Owen Kline and Andrew Lampert
2014, 14 minutes, video.

A twilight tale of a talk show host seeking a successor
and the little girl who comes a-knockin' at his door....

Starring Joe Franklin, and introducing Zazie Nam June.

Premieres at BAM CINEMAFEST on Wednesday, June 24 st 9:45 p.m.

Poster art by Drew Freidman

Poster art by Drew Freidman

2015 CAA Conference Screening and Roundtable /  by melinda shopsin

Thursday, Feb. 12
New York Hilton Midtown, Gibson Room
4pm-5:30pm

A screening and roundtable/Q&A session
@ the 2015 CAA annual conference
with myself, Kalup Linzy, C. Spencer Yeh, Paul Slocum and Dara Birnbaum. Organized by Jenny Marketo, Rachael Rakes and Rebecca Cleman

TASTE TEST (2011) is included in the program titled Mobile Strategies Replace Finished Recipes, or in the Words of Gilles Deleuze, “Amid Things but in the Center of Nothing”

 

George Kuchar in Pittsburgh /  by melinda shopsin

Ephemera created by Orgone Cinema for their visit from George in the 1990s....

Ephemera created by Orgone Cinema for their visit from George in the 1990s....

Carnegie Museum of Art
Pittsburgh, PA
Thursday, February 5th @ 6:30 PM

Join Andrew Lampert, editor of The George Kuchar Reader, for a reading from Kuchar’s notebooks and a screening of his rarely-seen 16mm films Eclipse of the Sun Virgin (1967, 15 min.), Power of the Press (1977, 16 min.), Forever and Always (1978, 20 min.), and Yolanda (1981, 22 min.).

Over the course of his 50 year career, from his teenage years in the Bronx until his untimely death in 2011, George Kuchar created an incomparable body of nearly 350 films and videos. Teeming with ribald humor and unswerving illogic, and with a refined sense of the absurd and a “no budget, no problem” attitude, his ceaseless output veered from outlandish spoofs on schlocky Hollywood melodramas to intimate documents of his everyday life.
 

GUIDED BY VOICES: 6 FILM RESTORATIONS /  by melinda shopsin

Cinémathèque Française
Thursday, January 29, 2015
9:30 pm

I'm in Paris to introduce a program of recent restorations and digitizations by Anthology Film Archives as part of the s esteemed Toute la mémoire du monde festival.

GUIDED BY VOICES (2000) by Stom Sogo.

GUIDED BY VOICES (2000) by Stom Sogo.

Bedtime Story de Esther Shatavsky
Etats-Unis/1981/6’/35mm

Surface Tension de Hollis Frampton
Etats-Unis/1968/10’/16mm

An Algorithm de Bette Gordon
Etats-Unis/1977/10’/16mm

Harmful or Fateful if Swallowed de Manuel De Landa
Etats-Unis/1982/12’/Numérique

Color Sound Frames de Paul Sharits
Etats-Unis/1974/22’/16mm

Guided by Voice (original version) de Stom Sogo
Etats-Unis/2000/10’/Numérique


Don’t Lose the Manual at the Visual Art Center University of Texas at Austin /  by melinda shopsin


An exhibit of new photographs and videos
Visual Art Center, University of Texas at Austin
September 19 - December 6, 2014

In DON'T LOSE THE MANUAL, Andrew Lampert explores a personal dimension of technology and technological change. As an artist who is also an archivist specializing in moving-image media, Lampert works with both analog and digital technologies every day, confronting issues of preservation, storage, and the presumed historical relevance (or irrelevance) of various media and objects. The photographs and videos in DON'T LOSE THE MANUAL reflect Lampert’s archival interests, but do so by addressing the preponderance of technology in contemporary life. With candor and humor, the works reveal the artist’s ambivalence about adapting to a world seemingly run by gadgets and social media, yet also illustrate his fascination with the incremental life changes wrought by constant technological change.

Several groupings of images present technologies, or situations involving technologies, that Lampert experiences on a regular basis, including a photographic catalog of every device that he used on a particular day. The exhibition also includes a number of videos in which Lampert asks individuals about the role of technology in their lives. These encounters indicate differing comfort levels with old as well as new technologies, but they also suggest the impossibility of privileging the old over the new, since for better or worse, most things eventually break or succumb to disuse. Presented through a somewhat bewildered lens of personal experience, the themes of DON'T LOSE THE MANUAL are broad and immensely relatable.

Curated by Robin Williams, 2013–2014 VAC Curatorial Fellow

 

Andrew Lampert & Chris Corsano at Aurora Picture Show in Houston, Texas /  by melinda shopsin

DON'T LOSE THE MANUAL
Filmmaker Andrew Lampert and Musician Chris Corsano in attendance
Monday, December 8, 7:00PM (Members Only Reception, 6PM)
Aurora Members Free (with RSVP), Non-members $10

DON’T LOSE THE MANUAL is a merrily convoluted evening of moving image and music performance involving broken gear and wildly unpredictable results. Chris Corsano’s galvanizing percussion kicks filmmaker Andrew Lampert into action mode as the improvisatory duo explore the limited options and perhaps harrowing consequences of playing with what you’ve been dealt. Less psychedelic and more psychological, this haphazard duo deconstructs expanded cinema performance with high tension and hilarity.

This performance occurs in tandem with Lampert’s photo and video exhibition DON’T LOSE THE MANUAL on display at the Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas at Austin (September 19 through December 6, 2014).  This performance is co-sponsored by the Visual Arts Center in the Department of Art and Art History at The University of Texas at Austin.

Behind the Screens Receptions With Andrew Lampert and Chris Corsano
Monday, December 8, 6:00PM
Free for Aurora Members with RSVP

Aurora Picture Show members are invited to a pre-screening reception with light bites and cocktails, plus an opportunity to chat with Filmmaker Andrew Lampert and Musician Chris Corsano.  

Focus Group Presents: Andrew Lampert & Chris Corsano In Performance /  by melinda shopsin

Andrew Lampert & Chris Corsano: Live
Friday, December 5th, 7:00 PM
Visual Art Center at the University of Texas at Austin

Join the eclectic duo of artist Andrew Lampert and musician Chris Corsano for a merrily convoluted evening of moving image and music performance involving broken gear and wildly unpredictable results. Chris Corsano's galvanizing percussion kicks filmmaker Andrew Lampert into action mode as the improvisatory duo explore the limited options and perhaps harrowing consequences of playing with what you've been dealt. Less psychedelic and more psychological, this haphazard duo deconstructs expanded cinema performance with high tension and hilarity.

Presented by Focus Group in conjunction with the exhibition ANDREW LAMPERT: DON'T LOSE THE MANUAL, on view September 19 - December 6.

Many thanks to Rachel Stuckey for her documentation efforts of the event described above.