Sight/Geist: Reproducible Intimacy
Screening & Discussion
Thursday, May 25, 2023
6-8:30pm
The 8th Floor
17 W 17th Street, NYC
Haisi Hu, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 2022. Video still. Courtesy of the artist.
This thematic grouping of films addresses intimacy in a variety of bodily, reproductive, and emotional forms, chosen from our open call. Selections in this program include The Garden of Earthly Delights (2022) by Haisi Hu, There are things in this world that are yet to be named (2020) by Erin Johnson, In Tandem Pt. II: The Planet Egg (2022) by Simone Barros, The Body Is A House Of Familiar Rooms (2021) by Lauryn Welch & Eloise Sherrid, and What I Want for You (2022) by Jolie Ruelle.
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.
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Jolie Rulle is an artist and educator working in animation, motion designer, and sound design. She received her BFA from Massachusetts College of Art, Boston (2004), and an MFA from the University of California Santa Cruz (2012). She has worked for Big Pink Motion Graphics, NY, NY (2005) and Kenneth Cole Productions, NY, NY, (2007-8) creating animation, video, and design content. She later joined FLYP media, NY, NY (2009), an online magazine, where she explored the role of editorial animation and collaborated with Scientific American, Fortune, ProPublica, and The Washington Post. Since 2012, Jolie has been passionately lecturing; at the Department of Digital Art and New Media, University of California (2012) and Turo College, NY, NY., in the field of photography, animation, motion design and video. Her current areas of interest include merging analog animation practices with digital compositing techniques and exploring animation’s potential for social/ environmental impact.
Simone Barros, a Cape Verdean American filmmaker whose cinematic and soundscape mediations breach the boundaries of solipsism to embark upon a symbiosis with the collective unconscious and life (as such a thing exists). Her work rails against constructions of race and notions of phenomenal selfhood. In her filmmaking practice, time ticks by not in seconds or minutes but in the space of movements: moving images and sounds. The Third Coast International Audio Festival featured Simone’s soundscape in their 2020 Third Place Audio Festival Experimental Listening Workshop and the On Air Festival 2021 Official Selections included Simone's audio drama. Simone’s short films have screened at MONO XVI Cinematic Arts Festival, Cosmic Rays Film Festival, the Cleveland International Film Festival and the Chagrin Documentary Film Festival. Simone’s short plays and devised theater works were produced and staged at the Cleveland Public Theatre. Simone earned a BFA at New York University Tisch School of the Arts and concludes her MFA at Duke University’s Experimental and Documentary Arts in May.
Erin Johnson (b. 1985, US) is a visual artist based in New York who was recently named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine. Her short films and immersive installations interlace documentary, experimental, and narrative filmmaking devices to interrogate notions of collectivity, dissent, and queer identity. In her shape-shifting videos, site-specific performances by artists, biologists, and film extras address ongoing legacies of scientific research and nationalism. Johnson received an MFA and Certificate in New Media from UC Berkeley in 2013, attended Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2019 and recently completed residencies at Pioneer Works (Brooklyn, NY), Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht, NL), Lower Manhattan Community Council (LMCC), Hidrante (San Juan, PR), and Lighthouse Works (Fishers Island, NY). She is Chair of the Department of Film and Video at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work has recently been exhibited or screened at MOCA Toronto (Toronto), Munchmuseet (Oslo), Times Square Arts (New York), deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (Boston), Billytown (The Hague), and Telfair Museums (Savannah).
Lauryn Welch and Eloise Sherrid are Brooklyn-based artists working in painting and documentary film. They collaborate on stories about the hidden worlds of the people they love. Their recent film The Body Is A House of Familiar Rooms has been screened at Hot Docs, IndieMemphis, and BAMcinemaFest, among other locations. Eloise received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and Lauryn is an MFA candidate at CUNY Hunter College. They met as students at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2011 and have been working together ever since.
Haisi Hu has been making and expanding traditional animations such as Claymation and hand-drawn animation. Her claymation films are shown worldwide and locally, including Animation Nights New York and Brooklyn Film Festival. She is the recipient of the NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music, and Theater, the NYFA Fellowship, the Jerome Foundation Film Production Grant, and NYSCA Film/Media grants. She teaches animation to high-school students. Hu was born in China and immigrated to the US in the 90s.
Image description: A still image from an animated film made with a variety of media depicting a pizza shop. A gray clay figure wearing a black mask stands behind a counter tending to the pizza oven, with a refrigerator full of colorful soda to the left. Tiny, hungry gummy bears jump up onto the counter.