Sunday, January 8 at 8 pm

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 in-person to introduce their work. This program features new and recent works by Whitney Hubbs, Azadeh Navai, Alison O’Daniel, and Paul Pescador.

Alison O’Daniel’s The Tuba Thieves. Combining narrative, experimental, and documentary film, performance, sculpture, and installation, Alison O’Daniel structures her work as a call-and-response between mediums and meanings. Her collaborations with composers and musicians often highlight the loss or re-creation of information as it passes through various channels, building a visual, aural, and haptic vocabulary as a means to tell stories inspired by events that are both historic and quotidian. O’Daniel’s current project, The Tuba Thieves, made in the wake of tuba robberies from Los Angeles schools, elliptically connects the story of a Deaf drummer to the students, band directors, and school communities who must reconcile with missing sound following the thefts. The film is composed of portraits of music and silence in Los Angeles and beyond, and is interrupted by fictionalized re-enactments of two historic concerts: the 1952 premiere of John Cage’s 4’33” at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, NY and a 1979 punk concert hosted by Bruce Conner at The Deaf Club in San Francisco. Reversing the typical process wherein a composer responds to filmic imagery, O’Daniel commissioned musical scores by three composers and worked ‘backwards”, accumulating a narrative through a process of deep listening. First-hand accounts and real life details from collaborations with students, musicians, composers, and actors are continuously altering the narrative, which is filmed in segments over time, eventually forming a feature length film.

Paul Pescador will present his new short film Poolside (2016), based upon his experimental play Murder Mystery Dinner Theater. Told through puppets, mannequin, and voice-over, one family reunites in the Palm Springs desert amongst poolside cocktails and modernist vacation n homes to discuss a tragedy which has gone unspoken for the past 10 years.

Azadeh Navai will show her 16mm film Remembering the Pentagons, a slow, rhythmic and contemplative journey into her earliest childhood memories. With an old 16mm Bolex and a hand-made pinhole camera, Navai returns to Tehran and Esfahan, Iran, where the perceptions and recollections of places, emotions, and scents serve as vehicles through which she exposes a deeply personal landscape. She asks — what is the texture of memory? In what ways does time — the light, wind, and air of history — wear upon the monuments and the images of the past? Her camera, gliding through mosques and the heady wares of a bazaar, provides grounding to narrative themes of childhood wonder and familial tragedy. But, as in memory, there is trouble in the image. The convulsions of recollection are perceptible even in the shifting grains of the film image — kaleidoscopic in their geometries of instability and flux. Born in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq war, Navai seeks to access a time of personal turmoil both for her family and for her birth country in this poetic capturing of place, history and memory.

Whitney Hubbs will also present recent videos.

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