NEW WORKS SALON XLIX
Saturday, March 16 at 8 PM
Doors 7:30 pm; $5 admission
The New Works Salons series is a casual forum for the presentation and discussion of new works in film, video, sound, and performance, with local and visiting artists often in-person to introduce their work. This, the forty-ninth program in the series, will feature work by Susanna Battin, Kate Lain, Ross Lipman, John Story, and Walter Vargas. John Story will show his work The Depoliticization of Black Cinema: Part One, from an ongoing video essay series analyzing films by and about African Americans. The primary concern of the series is the relationship these films have with the politics of liberation. The essays will also look at the rate to which these films have established themselves within the American film industry and the wider culture. Part one focuses on the work of Gordon Parks, specifically his achievement of being the first African American to direct a major studio film in the Hollywood system. Parks’ first feature, The Learning Tree will be under question, as well as his future work within the industry, and the general opinion of these works. Ross Lipman will show Billy and Charles, in which Billy Woodberry recounts his collaboration with Charles Burnett on the making of his classic film Bless Their Little Hearts. Walter Vargas will show a new work titled The Rose, Rows, and Rues of Pleasure: “things that happen in any space over the stretched canvas of time.” Kate Lain will show her new video Yellow Jubilee P260-5, in which paint sample cards normally trapped in a rigid grid of capitalism find new life when freed to dance across time. Susanna Battin will show two recent videos. In Plantago Major an often ignored, colonizing weed searches for solace through abstract painting, while It’s Not Easy Seeing Green is a piece of poetic research, a video document of Susanna’s collaboration with 300 elementary school students at Turning Point School, a nature video at the last preserved wetlands in Los Angeles.
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