April 18th, 2015
@ the Museum of Human Achievement
7:30pm
Free / Suggested Donation
A media artist whose research is motivated by a deep curiosity about human behavior and relationships, Jesse McLean’s work is concerned with both the power and the failure of the mediated experience to bring people together. She has presented her work at museums, galleries, and film festivals worldwide, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Venice Film Festival, CPH:DOX (Copenhagen), the Images Festival (Toronto), among many others. Experimental Response Cinema, in collaboration with the Department of Art & Art History at Texas State University, is excited to present this screening with the artist in person!
“McLean works primarily with found footage, a natural outgrowth of her concern with irony and authenticity; to re-contextualize footage is to ask fundamental questions about its function within culture and automatically to cast aspersions on its original reception. McLean’s films expertly and violently toggle between outrageous, air-quoted self-doubt and outpourings of urgent, unnerving emotion.” – Tom McCormack, Cinema Scope Magzine
Presented in collaboration with the Art History Department at Texas State University in San Marcos. Special thanks to Prof. Jennifer Stob in co-organizing this screening.
Notes: New Technology to Make Data Self-Destruct: The Video Songbook of Jesse McLean by Jason Livingston.
Program
I’m in Pittsburgh and it’s Raining
14:26 min / HD / sound / 2015
Anecdotally, Andy Warhol once asked the Velvet Underground that the record bearing his name be inscribed with a purposeful skip during the song “I’ll be Your Mirror.” Listeners, faced with the endless repetition of that particular lyric, would be forced to rouse themselves and manually drive the needle onward. The group declined this request.
I’m in Pittsburgh and It’s Raining honors the concept: both the act and the idea of being caught in a reflexive moment. This video is an experimental portrait of a lighting stand-in/body double whose work and corporal self appears in films even if her name does not. Through a purposeful masking of the (sometimes subtle) differentiations between performance and acting, famous Hollywood actress and her double, character, actual person, audience expectation, and cinema magic this video offers a look behind the silver screen.
Just Like Us
14:56 min / HD / sound / 2013
A familiar landscape comprised of box stores and parking lots proves a rich site for longing, intimacy, and radical change. Celebrities are observed in this environment and are reduced to ordinary beings in the process. An enigmatic protagonist reveals little moments of subjectivity that escape into the piece like a contaminant, rupturing the view and evidencing the paradox of connection and belonging within systems that simultaneously contain us and comprise us.
The Invisible World
20:12 min / HD / sound / 2012
A deceased hoarder, reconstituted through technology, recounts a difficult childhood as inhabitants of a virtual world struggle to reconcile materialistic tendencies. A scientist leads an effort to understand the passage of time, but the data is unreliable. The question remains, what happens to our things after we are gone?
In this video, materialism, emotional presence and the adaptive nature of human beings are broadly considered through the lens of time. A variety of time-based materials are collected (including home movies, internet videos, Sci-fi seventies films, and a photographed archive of objects) and collaged, revealing the filmmaker’s own hoarding tendencies. YouTube genres are parsed, including “haul” videos (where contributors display the results of a shopping spree) and unboxing videos (where a new purchase is unwrapped), and the results suggest not only how materialist tendencies have found a way to continue in the cresting virtual age but also how the need to own is often paired with the need to relate.
The present world is packed with objects that evidence human productivity, yet the desire to possess things remains somewhat mysterious. Lifeless objects become imbued with emotional significance, and possessions linked with personal identities, even as these objects bear a cool and distant witness to human struggles. The rapidly arriving future portends an intangible new world of virtual experience. How will we relate our materialist tendencies in this new world of immateriality?
Remote
11:06 / SD / sound / 2011
In the collage video Remote, dream logic invokes a presence that drifts through physical and temporal barriers.
There is a presence lingering in the dark woods, just under the surface of a placid lake and at the end of dreary basement corridor. It’s not easy to locate because it’s outside but also inside. It doesn’t just crawl in on your wires because it’s not a thing. It’s a shocking eruption of electrical energy.
The Eternal Quarter Inch
9:20 min / SD / sound / 2009
Dipping between ecstasy and despair, transcendence and absurdity, this movie journeys to a hidden space where you can lose your way, lose yourself in the moment, lose your faith in a belief system. An exhausted and expectant crowd waits on this narrow span. It is not a wide stretch, but it can last forever.