Rachel Stevens » moving image

The Hoosac Institute Journal #5

If you haven’t encountered The Hoosac Institute, you are in for a treat. I am delighted to be included in Journal 5. “The Hoosac Institute is a curated platform for text and image focusing on pieces that don’t fit conventional disciplinary narratives.” Girl, do I feel at home in that genre category. So many in-between and not-quite-realized ideas by brilliant folks can be found here. My contribution is a new film trailer (Trailer II, 2020) for Survivalist Cinema, made from fragments of 1970s eco disaster and survivalist films processed with analog tools at Signal Culture. More on the trailers here.

Deep thanks to Jenny Perlin, Director and mastermind, of course. I am a true fan of her work.

Also take note of the excellent hashtag navigation:

Body Memory at Union Docs

So fun to introduce and facilitate this discussion with Faith Holland and Seth Barry Watter of their essay on work by Shana Moulton paired with Jennifer Reeder’s terrific film A Million Miles Away on the occasion of the launch of Millennium Film Journal #70, Body Memory. So many thanks to Union Docs in Brooklyn, one of my favorite venues for independent and experimental cinema, for hosting and co-presenting this evening on December 15th. Having grown up surrounded by “New Age” influences I particularly enjoyed delving into Shana Moulton’s work and remain a big fan. Faith and Seth sparkled with brilliance.

From Union Docs:

Among the common tropes of the New Age healing narrative is that the self must be dismembered before it can be made whole. Visualization and channeling, aromatherapy and crystals are aids to that labor of self-excavation. Moulton’s deft use of the video medium has often gone far to portray such experience—to make graphically manifest the metaphysics of feeling-good. […] The riddle posed by Whispering Pines as a whole is: what’s wrong? Each episode attempts in some way to solve it. Moulton offers one clue in Whispering Pines 7 (2006) when she sings in the form of a cubistic sphinx: “Now that I’m a woman, everything is strange.” —Faith Holland & Seth Watter “From Picture Plane to Astral Plane: Shana Moulton’s Whispering Pines”

We are excited to host a festive evening dedicated to the latest volume of Millennium Film Journal, BODY MEMORY. In celebration, we have invited featured writers from this volume, Faith Holland and Seth Barry Watter, to unpack and walk us through their essay “Picture Plane to Astral Plane” that examines Video Artist Shana Moulton’s video performance series Whispering Pines. We will share a program of Moulton’s videos alongside Jennifer Reeder’s film A Million Miles Away, also featured in this volume of the journal to open up a conversation around contemporary feminist filmmaking perspectives and practice. Millennium Film Journal’s Editor Grahame Weinbren will be in attendance with Rachel Stevens to introduce this volume and the program. Following a presentation from Seth Watter and Faith Holland, Stevens will lead a conversation with them on the films and their work.
https://uniondocs.org/event/2019-12-15-body-memory/

Puffin Foundation grant

So honored to receive funding from the Puffin Foundation for the research and film project I am working on. It the first grant we applied for! The working title is Place of the Big River (Kaniatarowanénhne) or On the Rough Waters (Kahnewake) and the project explores ecological, infrastructural and territorial entanglement at the St. Lawrence River. Artist and filmmaker Pawel Wojtasik is a primary collaborator and cinematographer. We still have way to go with funding, but this is an auspicious start. Thank you Puffin Foundation!

Signal Culture residency

I am super excited for a week-long residency later this week with Signal Culture in freezing cold and snowy Owego, NY. I’ll be bringing some media from an installation I made years ago with the intention of trying out some of their cool signal processing tools to add abstration and editing it into a single channel piece. As I have never been before, I solicited information from media artists and theorists who have and got such great advice, synthesized (no pun intended) here:

Have fun!!
Bring lots of source material.
Don’t sleep!
Bathe very infrequently.
Prepare to have your mind blown by Dave Jones.
Don’t forget to visit Hand of Man!
Jail meal at your own risk.
Shop at Two floor thrift/vintage on the corner.
Walk along the river.
Have an amazing time!
Have a plan that you can abandon. The machines are alive and take a bit longer to get going.
Bring a notebook so you can get back to something that got interesting results. Some of the best things happen when you lose track of how you got this or that result.
Experiment!
Walk to the cemetery.
Breakfast at diner across the street to get a feel for the place.
Bakery downstairs.
Abandon control.
Take your time exploring town as all of this could take just one afternoon.
Don’t forget your snow boots!
If you’re up for a challenge ask about Ghost Pepper Pizza night at John Barleycorn’s!

Thanks so much Annie Berman, Torsten Zenas Burns, Karl Erickson, Kristen Lucas, Darrin Martin, Monica Panzarino and Jim Supanick for the advice!

Stream 3 is almost here

Two Chairs has organized a third year of the exhibition taking place in Vermont around a stream. This year we have an official Two Chairs Facebook page and a successful Kickstarter campaign!

Artists this year: Peggy Ahwesh (US), Annie Berman, (US), E.E. Ikeler (US), Yu Jin (China), Juneau Projects (UK), Louise Lawler (US), David Nash (UK), Kenneth Pietrobono (US), Rachel Stevens (US), Zoe Walsh (US), Marina Zurkow (US)