Alexandra Chasin, with Cathy Lee Crane (Reading/Screening), plus Rae Goodwin (Performance), and Sarah Boyer (Reading), October 24, 2014
On Friday, October 24, at 7 p.m., Counterpath hosted a reading by Alexandra Chasin, a screening of work by Chasin and Cathy Lee Crane, a performance by Rae Goodwin, and a reading by Sarah Boyer.
Chasin and Crane presented “Charadrius Dubius: A Play of Birds, Plants, and People in the Contact Zone,” which inverts Book 9 of Homer’s Odyssey, taking the perspective of the Lotus Eaters—and then inverts that perspective too. Disciplines from the Northern Hemisphere—Literature, Botany, Anthropology—go swirly in Equatorial climes. Humans from the Northern Hemisphere eat the local Lotus flower, changing the nature of contact. The number three takes flight. Everything comes from the sea and returns there after contact. Film director Crane offers the birds’-eyes view.
Alexandra Chasin is the author of two books of fiction, Kissed By and Brief, as well as the nonfictional Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market. Anslinger Nation: A Speculative History of the Origins of Drug Prohibition, Starring Harry J. Anslinger is due out in 2015. Chasin is Associate Professor of Writing and Literary Studies at Lang College, The New School in NYC, and Director of Writing On It All, a public participatory writing project that takes place every June on Governors Island in New York Harbor.
Cathy Lee Crane has been making hybrid narrative/documentary films on 16mm since 1994. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and individual grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the San Francisco Film Commission. Her first feature Pasolini’s Last Words (2012) enjoyed its world premiere at the Montreal Festival du Nouveau Cinema as a “gem of world cinema” in the Panorama International section and is being distributed on DVD in 2015 by Salzgeber. Her short films have been broadcast on European television and are distributed on 16mm by Canyon Cinema and Lightcone. She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema, Photography, and Media Arts at Ithaca College. http://cathyleecrane.com
Rae Goodwin’s (video above) work in performance, community engagement, photography, and sculpture examines the construction of identity, aspects of family history as it influences, maternal ancestry, as well as gender-based assumptions about freedom, the unknown and community. Using humor, repetitive methods and suggestive materials, she challenges her own concepts of identity, family, gender and society and invites viewers to examine their own awareness through the process. Rae received her MFA from Winthrop University and has shown at the contemporary, McColl Center for Visual Art, defibrillator gallery, sign6, along with other venues. She currently serves as Director of Art Foundations at the University of Kentucky. www.raegoodwin.com
Sarah Boyer is a PhD candidate in poetry at the University of Denver. She is originally from South Dakota and has a book forthcoming, Howard, from
Photo credit Eva Campos Suarez.