Screening: Amy Reid’s Long Haulers, plus work by Emma Piper-Burket, Eileen Roscina, Ann Roy, and Emilie Upczak, Friday, March 31, 2023, 7pm
Join us on Friday, March 31, 7pm, at Counterpath (7935 East 14th Ave.) for a special screening of Amy Reid’s Long Haulers, as well as a short films by Emma Piper-Burket, Eileen Roscina, Ann Roy, and Emilie Upczak, with works dealing with representations of the road, gender, and networks of industry and nature. Suggested donation of $5-$15, all proceeds going to the artists.
Long Haulers (2020) Amy Reid , 74 min
“All truckers are either running away or running to something.” From 77 year-old Sandi, to formerly incarcerated Lori, to guinea pig lover Tracy, Long Haulers defies stereotypes and gives a platform to women who have often been marginalized and type-casted. Sharing their sorrows and triumphs, viewers learn who these women are, and what keeps them trucking.
Emma Piper-Burket (Driving Dinosaurs, 9:20 min, 2019 / Super 8) is a visual artist, filmmaker and writer using fiction, non-fiction and collected media to investigate interactions between nature, society and the human spirit. Her work is process-based and research driven, incorporating social trends, ancient history, science, politics, ephemera and the natural world into her creative practice. Emma has received support from Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Ebert Foundation, Sundance Institute, Light Cone, Visual Studies Workshop, Marble House Project, and Middlebury Script Lab among others for her creative works; her writing has appeared in Reverse Shot, Mubi Notebook, and RogerEbert.com. She is a PhD candidate in Critical Media Practices at University of Colorado Boulder and holds an MFA in cinema and digital media from FAMU in Prague, and a BA in Arabic and classical studies from Georgetown University.
Amy Reid (Long Haulers, 74 min, 2020 / 16mm & Video ) is an artist and filmmaker whose work examines the intersections between gender, national identity, and labor. By exploring observational approaches and expanding upon formal cinematic notions of time, structure, and narrative, Reid’s work questions how labor is constructed in the filmic form through feature length films, video installations, and texts. These multi-year projects, often working closely with a group—long haul female truckers, quilters, e-commerce sellers—premise upon collaboration, performance, and experimentation. Reid received her BFA from The Cooper Union in 2009 and their MFA in 2017 from the University of California, San Diego. Reid is an alumnus of The Whitney Independent Study Program and has shown her work at spaces such The Prelinger Library in San Francisco, Workers Unite Film Festival in New York City, and the I See Video Festival in Shanghai. Currently Reid is pursuing a doctoral degree in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz where part of her dissertation work is a feature-length experimental documentary looking at women, quilting, and 19th century U.S. history.
Eileen Roscina (On the Tip of My Tongue, 10:20 min, 2019 / 16mm) is an artist, experimental filmmaker and naturalist from Denver, Colorado. She earned a BFA from Emerson College in Boston, MA, is an MFA candidate at University of Colorado, Boulder and trained at the School of Botanical Art and Illustration in Denver. Through biomimicry and the study of biophilia, her work examines human’s spiritual and social (dis)connection with nature, and seeks to raise questions about realizing a radically different metaphoric mapping of time, space and our place in the world. She has exhibited film internationally, and visual art at Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Denver Art Museum, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Boulder), Museo de Las Americas (Denver), Vicki Myhren Gallery at University of Denver (Denver), Center for Visual Art (Denver), Arvada Center (Arvada), Dairy Art Center (Boulder), University of Colorado (Boulder), Salina Art Center (Kansas) and was the 2019 Resident Artist for the National Western Stock Show, a 2018-2020 resident at RedLine Contemporary Art Center, Denver. She is represented by Walker Fine Art Gallery in Denver, CO
Ann Roy (Four Friends, Drag Pageant, 6:30 min total, 1970s / Super 8) born in Tulsa, OK attended Mills College in Oakland, CA, where she worked as a poet and a published cartoonist in the style of William Steig. Her book, Absolutely Normal (Houghton Mifflin, 1947) was critically acclaimed. With her first husband Robert Emmitt, she went unacknowledged as the fieldworker who interviewed all the Ute Indian women whose stories contributed to Emmitt’s classic book The Last War Trail. With her second husband,the artist John Nevin, she traveled to Italy and Spain and commemorated their experience with a book of photographs and poems, Travels in Italy: A Magic Lantern Show. After a brief time drawing and painting in the artist community of Jerome, Arizona, she and Nevin started a family and moved with their two sons to Marfil, Guanajuato. There she worked with local women, designing women’s and children’s clothing. Her designs utilized fabric from the textile mills in nearby San Miguel de Allende and incorporated traditional folklore designs and embroidery. Inspired by the artistic and international ethos of Eleanor Lambert, she created a women’s cooperative that produced a line of clothing which was sold through an outlet in Scottsdale, Arizona.
After the breakup of her second marriage, she moved to Tepoztlán, Morelos, a center for international spiritual seekers offering mystic adventurism and hallucinatory experiences. There she worked with the astrologer John Starr Cooke and the feminist Margaret Fiedler. In Tepoztlán, she filmed fantasy Super-8s of her young friends who were exploring identity and magic, often under the influence of LSD and psilocybin mushrooms. With local artist Rita de Tepoztlán she created a series of photographs of Christa, the female Christ. Roy became known as a leading thinker of feminist cosmology in the area. She taught at the Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC), founded by the former Catholic monsignor Ivan Illich, in Cuernavaca. She taught symbol systems (I Ching, Astrology, Tarot) and one of the first ever courses on women in Mexico.
Emilie Upczak (The Controlled Wild, 4:05 min, 2019 / Video, Co-Director Nicholas Emery) is an independent filmmaker, a Rotterdam Producers Lab alumni and an Andy Warhol Foundation Grant recipient.Emilie spent ten years in Trinidad and Tobago, where she made films and worked as the Creative Director for the trinidad+tobago film festival spearheading the Caribbean Film Database and the Caribbean Film Mart. Emilie’s debut narrative feature, set in Port of Spain, “Moving Parts”, premiered at the Denver Film Festival and is available through the film’s distributor, Indiepix. Emilie is currently on Fellowship with the Center for Humanities & the Arts, working with the Rare and Distinctive Collections at the University of Colorado Libraries to create a digital exhibition on the collection of Ann Roy, an American poet, mystic and feminist activist. She is also in development on her second feature film, a climate story, to be set in the near future on the Colorado River in Grand Canyon. Emilie Upczak is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts, and the Associate Faculty Director of the Brakhage Center for Media Arts at the University of Colorado, Boulder.