February 15th, 2014
@ MASS Gallery (map)
8:00pm
Free ($5 – $10 Suggested Donation)
Experimental Response Cinema and MASS Gallery are pleased to present the unlikely pairing of works by Gunvor Nelson and Bobby Abate. Nelson hails from Sweden and entered the scene as a fixture in the 1960s/70s Bay Area avant-garde film scene. Abate is a New York based artist of the internet generation, working primarily with video. Both artists explore topics of identity, family, and society. Programmed by Rachel Stuckey.
MASS fosters exploratory modes of creation by encouraging artists to broaden the scope of their practice, while providing a friendly conversation space for the community to engage with contemporary art.
This project is funded and supported in part by the City of Austin through the Economic Growth & Redevelopment Services Office / Cultural Arts Division believing an investment in the Arts is an investment in Austin’s future. Visit Austin at NowPlayingAustin.com.
Red Shift by Gunvor Nelson
50 min / 16mm / sound / 1984
Starring: Carin Grundel, Oona Nelson, Gunvor Nelson, Regine Grundel, Ulla Moberg, Gunnar Grundel.
Assistant: Diane Kitchen
RED SHIFT is a film in black and white about relationships, generations and time. The subtitle is ALL EXPECTION. The movement of a luminous body toward and away from us can be found in its spectral lines. A shift toward red occurs with anybody that is self-luminous and receding. There is uncertainty about how much observable material exists.
“It involves Gunvor Nelson, her mother and her daughter. Carefully and with great tenderness, it focuses on these three women, trying to show us their relationship, succeeding with an emotional impact that is hardly ever found in such a subject. It is not the social context which is exploited but the little gestures, everyday events. RED SHIFT is a radical film; it sets new measures for avant-garde filmmaking dealing with personal problems.” – Alf Bold, The Arsenal, Berlin
The Evil Eyes by Bobby Abate
20 min / digital / sound / 2011
An homage to the death of the soap opera, The Evil Eyes is a 1960’s era story of a grandmother faced with her mortality, a mother in mid-life crisis, and a son realizing his sexuality – a dysfunctional family whose unspoken angst manifests in the latest episode of their beloved supernatural soap opera, Before Dawn.
Tina Sloan, 26-year veteran of Guiding Light, stars as the soap’s the death-cursed matriarch whose daughter slowly vanishes into thin air and grandson channels the family’s fate using his crystal ball. On the other side of the screen, a woman is so desperate for her family’s attention she figures the only way to get it is to be on television.
Cinematographer Bradford Young evokes a dreamlike atmosphere using monochromatic studio cameras of the era. Filming took place at St. Cecilia’s Convent in Brooklyn, New York. In contrast, the colorful 1960’s living room was shot separately in high definition on location in suburban New Jersey.
Written and Directed by Bobby Abate. Produced by Bobby Abate and Ben Howe.
Frame Line by Gunvor Nelson
22 min / 16mm / sound / 1984
FRAME LINE is a collage film in black and white. Glimpses (both visual and audial) of Stockholm, people, gestures, flags and the Swedish national anthem appear through drawings, paintings and cut-outs. It is a film with an eerie flow between the ugly and the beautiful about returning, about roots and also about reshaping.
“Distilled bits of psyche break from the assemblage to skitter across struggling places seeking niches and forming patterns with careening desperation …. FRAME LINE takes advantage to radically ignore any limits of emotional expression. Without excuses, or so much as even a token glance back, FRAME LINE at once sets standards that put to rest that silly notion ‘the tradition of the Avant-Garde.'” – Rock Ross, Reversal