For the remainder of 2020, we decided to hand the curatorial duties to a handful of friends we’ve worked with previously. These programs will highlight the people working in the time-based arts in their community. This is an idea we’ve been kicking around for a long time with it initially being a fest that would explore different regions of the US and now felt like a good moment to explore it further. If 2020 has shown us anything it’s that our community is the only thing we can actually rely on.
8:15pm October 9th, 2020
Friends of Friends Community Series:
A Container of Light: Films from the Sonoran Desert
Curated by: Nika Kaiser
About the curator: Nika Kaiser is a visual artist and curator working with photography, video, and installation. Her art practice intersects ideas of mysticism, interspecies connection, and future ecologies.
Kaiser received her MFA in Visual Art from University of Oregon in 2013. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including shows at the American Institute of Thoughts and Feelings, Tucson, AZ; Bruce High Quality Foundation, Brooklyn, NY; Coaxial, Los Angeles, CA; Portland Museum of Modern Art, Portland, OR; Border Patrol, ME; Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, NY; University of Dubai, UAE; WNDX Festival of the Moving Image, Winnipeg, MB; Antimatter [Media Art], Victoria, BC; University of Rostock Museum, GE. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, most recently the Arts Foundation New Works Grant and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship. She is an alumni member of the collective Ditch Projects in Springfield, OR and current member of the video collective Ungrund. Her photographs and videos have been featured in Wut Magazine, Azymuth (Spain), and on NPR. She is the curator at the Jewish History Museum in Tucson, AZ and she teaches experimental practices in the Department of Film and Television at the University of Arizona.
Statement for the program: In the Sonoran Desert, which is occupied O'Odham, Yoeme, and Seri indigenous land (now called Arizona and Sonora, Mexico), the only constant within an intricate biome of nature/culture is the everpresent illumination from an arid sun. This light is embodied in cycles of long days and sustained in 100+ degree temperatures through the night. A Container of Light imagines the omnipresence of sunlight held in the desert and a parallel notion of the exposure of light onto film-- or sensor-- as a means to contain a moving image. The videos in this screening navigate many of the nuances of this place: exploring human relation to nature translated through surrealism (David Fenster's Fly Amanita and Nika Kaiser's Threshold: Sonoran Sea), site-specific geographies as a stage for psychic reflection (David Sherman's ENCODED/EXPLODED and Faye Ruiz's The Lights are On, No One's Home) and narratives animating the impact of the present conditions at US/Mexico border (Wesley Faucett Creigh's Prototype and Miguel Fernández De Castro's A-22). Each film in the screening is a container in it's own right, all makers realizing a vision of place through diverse lenses. The locale between them is not imagined as a singular one, but culled broadly by the extreme desert conditions administered by film's most requisite tool: the sun.
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Artist: David Fenster
Title: Fly Amanita
Statement: The thoughts of an Amanita muscaria (also known as Fly Agaric or Fly Amanita) mushroom on his species' relationship with humans.
Year: 2010
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Artist: Nika Kaiser
Title: Threshold: Sonoran Sea
Statement: A single channel version of a two-channel video installation - Threshold: Sonoran Sea imagines a future narrative set at the meeting of land and sea in the coastal region of the Sonoran desert. A woman moves through spaces absent of human life and contemplates supernatural encounters in a slowly unraveling anthropocentric ecosystem.
Year: 2018
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Artist: Wesley Fawcett Creigh
Title: Prototype
Statement: “Prototype” is the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration with local educators and youth groups commissioned by MOCA Tucson and references Donald Trump's 2017 executive order and RFP for border wall prototypes. Local youth and student participants contributed all the visual, audio, and textual elements to this project and included: MOCA's weekly after school program for 8-11 year olds (artwork), a Pima Community College Border Cultures class (text), and a Tucson High School Art Appreciation class (audio). This work is an experiment in collaboration across age groups that tackles the complex topics of border culture and politics sourcing from experiences both real and imaginary.
Year: 2017
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Artist: David Sherman
Title: ENCODED / EXPLODED
Statement: Triangulated sites (Biosphere 2, Sunset Footprints, Casa Grande Domes) of virtual realities in the Sonoran Desert trace visionary intersections of the cultural and natural information systems that struggle against containment. Parables of ritualistic impermanence are rendered in the physical reliquaries of ancient technological futures.
Year: 2018
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Artist: Faye Ruiz
Title: The Lights are On, No One's Home
Statement: wandering a maze of gentrified streets. realizing that this summer afternoon reverie might be all that's left of that time. chasing after things that don't belong to you. never considering a different outcome, a gentler one.
Year: 2020
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Artist: Miguel Fernández De Castro
Title: 22-A
Statement: This video is part of a bigger project called ‘La erosión de los dominios’, which is related to the bodies that have been found in Sonora in recent years. These bodies, unlike those found in Arizona, are the result of forced disappearance directly related to drug trafficking to the US.
Year: 2020