Sight/Geist: Policing Reality
Screening & Discussion
Thursday, April 27, 2023
6-8:30pm
The 8th Floor
17 W 17th Street, NYC
Ciaran Short, Soul Search, 2022. Video still. Courtesy of the artist.
This thematic group screening centers on the role of violence in day-to-day reality, including active shooter training, police brutality, the wide-reaching implications of the prison system, and the memories of an artist who lost his cousin to gun violence. Selected from our new Sight/Geist open call, these personal and highly charged films include A Camera Captures Images, A Court Sets Them Free (2021) by Steven Cottingham, Signal and Noise (2022) by Jess Shane & Katie Mathews, Soul Search (2022) by Ciaran Short, and Drills (2020) by Sarah Friedland.
Doors will open at 6pm with Bang Geul Han’s Land of Tenderness partially on view. The screening will begin at 6:30pm, to be followed by a discussion and Q&A led by Foundation staff with artists in attendance.
All of our events are free and open to the public. For information about visiting and accessing our space, navigate here. Email us with any questions.
Sarah Friedland is a filmmaker and choreographer working at the intersection of moving images and moving bodies. Her work has been screened, installed, and performed across film, art, and dance venues including New York Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, MoMA, Ann Arbor Film Festival, BAMcinématek, Performa19 Biennial, La MaMa Galleria, Sharjah Art Foundation, Mubi, and the American Dance Festival, among many others. From 2021-2022, she was a Pina Bausch Fellow for Choreography, a NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Film/Video, Jerome Foundation Film/Video grantee, and a Su-Casa Teaching Artist, teaching filmmaking at a Brooklyn older adult center.
Ciaran Short is a multimedia artist and activist born and raised in NYC. His work explores New York culture and tackles issues of race and masculinity. He co-founded All Street, a protest group utilizing art to support social justice movements in NY. The collaborative artworks made during their protests are in the permanent collections of The New-York Historical Society, MCNY, and MOCADA. He has most recently completed an artist’s residency with Localhost Gallery and partook in a photography installation at Cornell University. He holds a masters in Media Studies from the New School and is adjunct faculty at NYU.
Steven Cottingham is an artist based in New York and Vancouver working with video, sculpture, and photoreal renderings. Recent solo exhibitions include VRAL (Milan, 2022), Natalia Hug Galerie (Cologne, 2022), and Alternator (Kelowna, 2020). Group exhibitions include Artists Space (New York, 2022), Vector Festival (Brampton, 2022), and The Polygon Gallery (North Vancouver, 2021). From 2018 to 2021 he co-edited the art theory periodical QOQQOON, and from 2021 to 2022 he participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program. He received an MFA from the University of British Columbia in 2017.
Katie Mathews is a filmmaker whose work blends non-fiction, fiction and experimental forms to create films that grapple with liminality and gray areas. She is currently directing the feature documentary Roleplay about art’s power to transform college rape culture, chosen for the 2021 Gotham Documentary Lab. Recently she co-directed an audio-first experimental short called Signal and Noise about a poet’s visit to Guantánamo Bay Detention Center that won the Special Jury Award at the New Orleans Film Festival and wrote and directed Dark Moon, a narrative short film about a father and daughter grappling with his Dementia, winner of the Davey Foundation and Dementia Spring Foundation grant awards. Previously, Katie produced and story edited Mossville, (Dir. Alex Glustrom) a feature documentary about environmental racism that premiered at Full Frame where it won the Human Rights Award. She also directed and produced Post Coastal, an NEA and Smithsonian-funded documentary series about Louisiana coastal communities and climate change. Her work has screened at festivals around the world including DOC NYC, Full Frame, & Raindance, in Teen Vogue, on PBS, and at the United Nations. She was a 2018 Fellow in the UnionDocs Documentary Lab, a 2018 Fellow in the inaugural New Orleans Film Society’s Southern Producers Lab, and a 2019 Fellow in the Points North Fellowship and Pitch. Katie holds a BA in Communications from Northwestern University and an MFA from the Integrated Media Arts program at Hunter College. She is a 2022 Princess Grace Award Winner for Film.
Jess Shane is a Canadian artist, documentarian, and educator based in Brooklyn. Her current work investigates media ethics and documentary history. Shane's work has featured at festivals internationally including On Air Fest, Open City Documentary Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, Prismatic Ground, Hearsay, and the International Features Conference. She has produced podcasts for clients including MoMA, TED, NBC, CBC, and BBC, and is a 2022 International Women's Media Fund recipient for a forthcoming podcast with Radiotopia. Her independent sound art podcast, Constellations, has been spotlighted in The New York Times, the Outline, and beyond.
Image description: Three ghostly photos, re-colored as white with slight gray outlines, depict different angles of a man casually looking at the camera. The photos float as 3D objects over a dark red and black background.