OFF Cinema Presents: Women of a Thousand Fires, Women of a Thousand Truths: The Poetic Cinema of VanderKellen and Strand, Tuesday, September 27, 2016
Counterpath is excited to host a screening presented by OFF Cinema on Tuesday, September 27, at 8 p.m.: Women of a Thousand Fires, Women of a Thousand Truths: The Poetic Cinema of VanderKelen and Strand. OFF Cinema is the cinematic programming collaboration of Jacob Barreras and libi rose striegl, and an offshoot of the Experimental Pints and Pictures microcinema in Fort Collins, CO. The program is listed below. $5 suggested donation.
Janelle VanderKelen is a video artist whose practice spans multiple media. Her work plays at the edges of things and explores the cultural and psychological impact of the experience of time, the linger, and things that are defiantly borderless, generatively erroneous, and that take up more time or space than they ought. She currently lives and works in Milwaukee, WI where she received both her MFA in Film, Video, and New Media and her MA in Art at the University of Wisconsin. Her work has screened and shown at festivals and galleries nationally and internationally. Some of her most recent exhibitions include ShapeShifters at The Grange Film Series in East Haddam, CT; The Milwaukee Underground Film Festival in Milwaukee, WI; and the traveling Femme Tour Truck Exhibition in conjunction with the Biennal Miradas de Mujeres at various cities throughout Spain and Portugal. http://janellevanderkelen.com
Chick Strand‘s (1931-2009) accomplishments as an artist spanned more than three decades. In the early 1960s, with a new anthropology degree in hand, she turned her attention to ethnographic filmmaking. Her early work focused on Meso-American cultures explored through the language of the experimental documentary. In 1961, she founded Canyon Cinema with Bruce Baillie, an organization that, in 1965, spawned the San Francisco Cinematheque. They organized screenings of experimental, documentary and narrative films in East Bay backyards and community centers. Acting in response to a lack of public venues for independent movies, they were part of a wider explosion in American avant-garde film. The era was one of social idealism and communal energy, and the films they showcased boldly embraced purely cinematic visual expression and cultural critique. Strand left Northern California in the late 1960s to pursue studies in ethnographic film at UCLA. She then joined the faculty of Occidental College, where she served as the director of the film as art program for a quarter of a century. In the 1970s she continued to define her visual technique, and her subjects more frequently became women. She soon evolved a distinctive film style: backlit subjects photographed in close up and in motion, with a handheld telephoto lens. The technique produced sensual, lyrical images that became Strand’s signature. Her entire filmography numbers nearly a score of works, and along the way, she also become an accomplished photographer and painter.
About the curators: