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.
Friends of Friends Community Series: This is Love
Curated by Lydia Moyer
December 18th, 2020
8:15PM (not punk time)
The stream will stay up until December 25th, 2020 at 11:59 (not punk time)
The screening is suggested donation of $10 or pay what you can.
All money collected goes to the artists in the screening equally. Always have. Always will. Please donate.
Send donations to (venmo *preferred*) @Adan-DeLaGarza
(paypal - *can charge a fee to transfer*) adanschool86@hotmail.com
scan code with paypal app! won’t work with camera phone.
About Lydia Moyer:
Lydia Moyer is a visual artist and media maker who lives and works in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. She is a professor in the art department at the University of Virginia.
Program Statement:
I live outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. Among other things, it is a transient college town where people come and go. My colleagues and I put a lot of creative energy into our students at the university where we teach and then, inevitably and rightly, they leave. So my creative community is in many ways a diaspora.
Charlottesville was the site of infamous far-right rallies a few years ago. There is a counterpoint to the white-supremacist terrorism those rallies highlighted here and a small part of that counterpoint is in the art department where I teach. What follows is a program of work by myself, my closest colleagues Federico Cuatlacuatl and Kevin Everson, and some of our recent and former students who have all come through Charlottesville in the last years and gone on to continue their work outside of Virginia.
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Artist: Paige Taul - director/cinematographer, Will Jones -cinematographer, Peter Andrews II- performer
Title: what’s good Bruce?
Statement: A critique of the phenomenology of the studio space presented by Bruce Nauman's piece "Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square" (1967). The "exaggerated manner" being the pimp walk, or swagger; both a culturally specific and masculinist gesture in contrast to Nauman's original gestures.
Year: 2018
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Artists: Federico Cuatlacuatl and sound by Joshua Rodenberg.
Title: Coapan En Espera
Statement: Coapan En Espera is an experimental documentary highlighting the migratory history and diaspora of a community from Cholula, Puebla, Mexico. The community of San Francisco Coapan first started migrating to the U.S in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. Now almost 30 years after the first people left their hometown, the hope of returning or not returning home one day reflects in this community’s current emotional flux of being on standby. With over half of the total community’s population now living in the U.S, the tensions and uncertainty deepen.
Year: 2019
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Artists: Video created by Susan Aparicio and voice by Peter Gunnarson
Title: This Is Love
Statement: This Is Love was created as a reaction to the ever-present white gaze. The video is a translation of the external political and media landscape in combination with the psychological internalization of whiteness. There is both a balancing act between identity and performativity, and good and evil.
Year: 2020
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Artists: Takahiro Suzuki - Sourced Images ― “The Hundred Greatest Stars” by James B. Kaler - Tara Lipinksi 1998 Olympic Free Skate Program from YouTube - Image+Sound Edit ― Takahiro Suzuki
Title: Biography of a Newborn Star
Statement: Scanned images representative of the 100 Greatest Stars in the cosmos are looped and layered to simulate the process of stellar formation. During the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics, Tara Lipinski won a gold medal performance in the free skate program. As a television spectator of the event, the moment of joy at the completion of the performance and the ecstatic commentary offered my first realization and distant glimpse into the formation of the stellar in the human form.
Year: 2015
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Artist: Lydia Moyer
Title: The Freedom of Tragedy (or the tragedy of freedom)
Statement: In 1881, Sarah Winchester inherited her husband’s share of the Winchester Rifle Company, a massive fortune by the standard of any time. She is best remembered for a sprawling home she later built in Santa Clara, CA, and the story that she built it to appease the ghosts of the people who had been killed by Winchester Rifles. She was a reclusive freethinker but there is no record that she was afraid of ghosts. It’s likely that story was invented to draw people to her former home which has been privately run as a tourist attraction for decades. Winchester’s wealth excused her from the traditional roles of white, upper-class femininity - she didn’t have to be a wife or a mother or a hostess to earn her keep. But her freedom came at the cost of great personal loss, including the loss of her only child in infancy, and the acceptance of profit from the mass manufacture and sale of arms which facilitated war and genocide in the US and abroad. This piece uses Winchester's life to consider the complicated costs of individual freedom.
Year: 2020
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Artist: Kevin Jerome Everson
Title: Partial Differential Equation
Statement: Partial Differential Equation (2020) is illustrated by mathematician Tariah Gatlin.
Year: 2020
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Artists: Made by Rachel Lane, with help from Takahiro Suzuki, who passed a Super 8mm camera back and forth with Rachel on a merry-go-round; John Misciagno, who helped Rachel test amplitude modulation with vocal performance using an ARP 2500 modular synthesizer; and Steve Wetzel, who taught Rachel how to make microphones and use them to begin a field recording practice.
Title: Optimistic Voices
Statement: Elements of play are teased apart and abstracted. Whirling motions and synthesizer sounds evoke a futuristic kind of merry-go-round.
The electronic music was made on an ARP 2500, a monophonic analog modular synthesizer. Field recordings were made on public ground using handmade electret condenser and contact microphones.
Year: 2017
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