EXTENDED!
pop-up screening at governors island 3 MORE weekends!
sept. 10/11th, 17/18th and 24/25th, 2011
I'm happy to be included in a "Pop-Up Screening" of 3 of my short videos as part of The West Harlem Art Fund's
LOOSELY COUPLED, a group exhibition on Governors Island. We'll be at No. 17 Nolan Park. Pop on over!
This weekend, The West Harlem Art Fund will host a “pop-up” film screening on Governors Island. What better way to enjoy a house but to watch movies. And these movies deal with the issues of home, memories and important places. These films are a part of a series called Upstairs in the Basement. Read more about each individual work and the artist.
Films: “Upstairs in the Basement”:
My maternal grandfather was a contractor and a kind of inventor. He built our two homes in Macon, GA. The first one burned to the ground as firemen and the Salvation Army watched from several yards away. I only knew the 2nd house, built in the early 1960s. It was a fascinating collage made of discarded materials from my grandfather’s job sites where he did decorative plaster-work in both antebellum mansions and modern city buildings. As a child, I was fascinated by the precarious ladder-pull attic where he kept his inventions and other antiquated curios. I had never seen a house with an attic.
Granddaddy loved to tell humorous stories and jokes but he also told bible and ghost tales. An anecdote that he would laughingly recount (to my embarrassment) was the time he and I were in the attic and my mother was calling for me from just below. I yelled; “I’m with Grandaddy! I’m Upstairs in the Basement!!” Telling this story would bring tears to his eyes.
The Macon house is in ruins now; our family home in New Rochelle where we lived for 40 years was sold after my father died, and my 1st apartment of my very own was overtaken by developers and recently razed. These 3 little films all have to do with movies, memories, spaces and lost or hidden images. And not incidentally, they were all created "at home"...
Short Films
“Leader Film (Civitella Ranieri)” (2009) 5 min. video/digital animation w/Viet Le, Vladimir Pistalo & Shyam Selvadurai. Divertissement set in the Civitella Ranieri, a castle in Italy. This “scrappy” short video emulates a reel of discarded outtakes used as film leader and filler when learning to edit.
"The Lincoln Film Conspiracy Prologue" (2007) 15 min. “trailer”. A multi-generic short film and multimedia installation that combines archival film footage, new video segments and digital image manipulation, collage and montage.
Based on the history of African-American independent silent and sound cinema, LFC is the story of an archivist who is investigating the disappearance of a collection of technologically progressive black films. Did the films disintegrate or explode like many other nitrate films? Evidence of great heat was found in the vicinity of the studio’s site. Conspiracy theories are outlined: Was there a government plot in conjunction with Hollywood to destroy these “positive” movies leaving only denigrating images of black people? Or have the movies been Abducted by Aliens?
"Il Giallo della Paine!" (2011) 8 min. A “scary” montage of vanished spaces playfully using the visual tropes and aural cues of 1970s, American and British horror and of the Italian thriller films known as "Giallo" (Yello).
Ina Archer — Artist
Ina was born in Paris, France. She earned a BFA in Film/Video from RISD and a MA, in Cinema Studies at NYU focusing on race, preservation, early sound cinema and technology. Ina’s multimedia works/films have been shown nationally including Cinema Project’s EXPANDED FRAMES: a celebration and examination of critical cinema in Portland,OR. and “Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image Since 1970” at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, GA. and The Contemporary Art Museum, Houston. Her awards include residences at Vermont Studio Center, Blue Mountain Center and Civitella Ranieri in Umbria, Italy. Ina was a Studio Artist in the Whitney Independent Study program, a NYFA multidisciplinary Fellow and a 2005 Creative Capital grantee in film and video, and 2010 nominee for the Anonymous Was A Woman award. She is a member of New York Women in Film and Television’s Women’s Film Preservation Fund and a board member of IMAP, Independent Media Arts Preservation.
Ina’s film writing includes reviews for Film Comment, The NY African Film Festival, Framework, The Journal of Cinema and Media, and Black Camera. She is an adjunct professor at Parsons The New School for Design in the Foundation Program of the School of Design Strategies.
I'll see you in the basement!
