Vanessa Renwick IN PERSON!!!
March 22nd, 2018
7:30pm Doors
8:00pm (not punk time) screening.
$10 or pay what you can. No one turned away.
Q&A after the screening
The Alamo Draft House Sloans Lake
4255 W. Colfax Ave., Denver, CO 80204
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Founder and janitor of the Oregon Department of Kick Ass
Daughter of the American Revolution
Born 1961 in Chicago, Illinois. Film / Video / Installation artist. Lives in Portland, Oregon
An artist by nature, not by stress of research. She puts scholars to rout by embracing nature's teaching problems that have fretted trained minds. Working in experimental and poetic documentary forms, her iconoclastic work embodies her interest in landscape and transformation, and relationships between bodies and landscapes, and all sorts of borders.
Vanessa Renwick has been a singular voice in the experimental cinema for over 20 years. Eschewing an allegiance to any one medium or form, Renwick builds authentic moving image works revealing an insatiable curiosity and unflinching engagement with the world around her. Often focusing her lens on themes of westward expansion and the locales of her adopted home, the Pacific Northwest, Renwick uses avant-garde formal elements to explore radical politics and environmental issues. An artist who often self-distributes, her screening history reads as a map of independent cinema worldwide. She has screened work in hundreds of venues internationally, institutional and not, including The Museum of Modern Art, Light Industry, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Art Basel, Oberhausen, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Centre Pompidou, Bread and Puppet Theater and True/False Film Festival, among many others.
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Title: Medusa Smack
Year: 2012
Statement: "What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get into the habit of thinking, this is the world, but that's not true at all. The real world is a much darker and deeper place than this, and much of it is occupied by jellyfish and things." - Haruki Murakami
Medusa Smack reminds us of our long ago origins as sea organisms, and invites viewers to return the sea and get trippy among our cousins.View the dreamy images of a smack, or group, of moon jellies and sea nettles drifting by with changing colors to a score composed and performed by Tara Jane O’Neil. The score was partially comprised with sounds recorded by the late Harry Bertoia on his own Sonambient sound sculptures, as well as a recording Tara made of 17th-century scholar and polymath Athanasius Kircher’s Bell Wheel at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles.
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Title: Hope and Prey
Year 2004
Statement: When we speak of hunting it’s important to remember the two parties involved, the hunter and the hunted; both are running for their lives. Hope and Prey features stunning wildlife cinematography of this epic eternal truth. 3 side-by-side reels play a panoramic view mimicking that of the wide natural landscape that invites the approach of any predator from anywhere. The installation reminds us of the fact that predators have eyes on the front of the head, while prey have eyes on the sides; the audience here definitely has to keep an eye out for danger. Black-and-white high-contrast recomposition transforms the adrenal-pumping, dramatic and occasionally brutal cinematography while a hyper-dynamic score by Portland’s infamous underground composer, Daniel Menche, adds a haunting human influence to the riveting experience.