Satellite

Aperture/Corridor (a brighter darkness) by Karissa Hahn: Mono No Aware Open Air Screening Series

EPFC | July 30th, 2021

From dusk until dawn on September 10 and September 11

Mono No Aware’s OPEN AIR SCREENING SERIES presents 16MM films on LOOP visible from a distance from dusk until dawn, at 72 ROCKWELL PLACE, Brooklyn, New York 11217 – Between BRIC Media Arts Center & BAM Rose Cinemas. This screening benefits The National Bailout via suggested donations at a sliding scale.

What was once taken for granted was never something to take for granted for. A loud crowd in a casino Sea of persons. Memory reconstructs now the most mundane acts into grand and lively moments. Murmured crowd in a terminal. Cashier’s hand brushing yours. The volume has been amplified; small insignificant events morphed into significance. Like a royal guard at ease, splayed out and lacking filter.

Karissa Hahn is a visual artist based in Los Angeles. Her work articulates the nature of contemporary image reproduction and dissemination through the use of analogue and digital technologies. Her work has shown in various cinemas, galleries, and institutions such as the New York Film Festival Projections, TIFF Wavelengths, MoMA’s Eyeslicer Series, CROSSROADS, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the Anthology Film Archives, among others. Hahn is currently completing a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science.

With this series we ask that each presenting artist identify a non-profit they wish to bring attention to and support through this screening Karissa has selected The National Bailout.

Please consider making a donation to support these efforts.

OPEN AIR SCREENING SERIES:
The OPEN AIR SCREENING SERIES allows for 16mm film projection viewing with social and physical distance guidelines in place. 16mm film prints are projected, on loop, from dusk until dawn. Each artist receives an honorarium to support their practice. Each artist is asked to select a non-profit for a portion of the proceeds to benefit, a donation will be made in their name. And, YOU the audience are invited to enjoy the work, take part in the conversation and we ask that you consider making a donation as it directly supports the artist and the organization with which they share concern.
Curated by Steve Cossman, the OPEN AIR SCREENING SERIES is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council.

Marvelous Movie Mondays: Karissa Hahn

EPFC | May 13th, 2020

Just a reminder! My name is Michael Woods aka M. Woods aka Disassociative Productions and I’m guest curating for the month – bringing you radical work in the times of corona.

Just a reminder, the theme for this month’s work is Body Politics + Digital Phenomenology. Please check out last week’s artist Xiaoer Liu

This week I’m breaking the rules and I’ll be showing multiple videos & highlighting awesome sounds – like DJ Activist Omjpg Yara aka I-VYE aka I-VYE ZYU GAWA. https://soundcloud.com/yaralaurine/tracks Check her work out for consciousness raising mixes. Dope shit for quarantine dancing and creativity building.

MOVIE TIME!!
I have gotten the privilege to curate my friend Karissa Hahn‘s work for years. Her work is already a fixture of Echo Park Film Center and LA and she is the perfect representative for that diverse and extraordinary scene, which includes LACDA Los Angeles Center for Digital ArtThe VAST Lab, and Los Angeles Filmforum – a network that has helped exhibit Karissa’s ‘spectra ephemera’, what she terms the ever-expanding universe of her work in multiple media.

Often, but not always, Hahn’s work begins with the use of super-8, a perfect mechanomorphic semi-automated apparatus for the depiction of a mundane digital world in semi-simulated, semi-mechanical, semi-broken disarray.

The movie I’m highlighting is Cataract Churning Grey – https://vimeo.com/416508335 – a horror film set in a transitory dream/wake state that begins with Hahn’s regular character, herself, in a larval state, wrapped in bed sheets. From the first image, Hahn evokes her own work – a wormhole connection to the movie ___________ https://vimeo.com/191743012 in which the horrors of the Trump administration lowly murmur in the background as she attempts to flatten her body until it is nothing but a line. A form of physical escape.

But in Cataract Churning Grey, Hahn falls into a mediated dream where she is forced into a Sisyphean loop, continually trying to ease the tension of a tea kettle propped against a desert backdrop that Hahn must continually traverse – portraying her struggle with a self-aware despair that borders on irony and actual exhaustion. She runs in slow motion, both mocking and acknowledging the prison of mundane suspense and time-space. She is both action hero and stuck in a molasses suspension of grey silvers that have sublimated into pixel meat that billows like the water vapor trying to escape. The kettle calls out like a siren, which draws Hahn’s Sisyphus out of fear of over-boiling, to alleviate the increasing pressure to become stranded in the rocks. (In this sequence, Hahn’s work reminds me of the way we compromise politically, trying to set the hot issues aside until they become catastrophic; until there is no way to stop them from boiling over.)

The key image of the movie occurs on Hahn’s third attempt – mocking and perfectly demonstrating the Hollywood rule of threes – the tea kettle is revealed to be propped precariously upon a mobile hot-plate next to an anonymous nowhere ocean.

The tension reaches its height as the threats to Hahn’s character’s body outweigh the fear of over-boiling. A new set of fears dominate – being drowned, electrified, abraded, and bruised, while Hahn calmly sets the kettle off the hot plate and finds herself back in the horrors of the mundane to continue the same task endlessly.

(The grey cataract of the title also reflects Hahn’s tendency to selectively and completely erase the identity of landscapes and objects. The cataract apparatus allows her to render all mis-en-scene in a hypnogogic micro-narrative. Her main character is almost a caricature of self. The super-8 and other analog/digital hybrid techniques she utilizes help to create this transitory state that functionally reflects the void between sleep and dream states in a world over-boiling in its own stew of physical reality/hyperreality/entropy/hypermundaneness.)

Cataract Churning Grey is genius in the way it serves to tie together pieces of the spectra ephemera. Other examples: it recalls the stranded mermaid that must abrade herself to be seen by the camera in Before the Portrait: https://vimeo.com/85898529

It recalls Hahn’s analog/digital trip-escapes like Please Step Out of the Frame https://vimeo.com/251074549 which connects to Open Window https://vimeo.com/190027404 which then connects to pieces like Thank You https://vimeo.com/415003964 in the way they interrogate and corrupt hybrid analog/digital technologies. Another essential part of her artmaking is her daily instagram experimentation using ink-jet printers, automated vacuum cleaners, slow-scan video sources, motion detectors, and all sorts of consumer instruments to further degrade the integrity of the mundane illusion.

Hahn’s work is radical, imaginative, unique, ever-expanding, and deserving of further critical examination for its complexity. Her place is already solidified amongst the best avant-garde filmmakers in history.

Last thing – I know I know tl;dr
A little shameless self-promotion, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen is this week. My movie Body Prop: Movement 2 [SOLAR NEMESIS] is playing in the Muvi International Section. CHECK IT OUT

Also, AGITATE:21C is our international avant-garde. Karissa has been one of the artists we’ve exhibited in the past. We’re open to anyone who is avant-garde. Totally inclusive except to haters and abusers. Promoting all voices – not just those that are white and male.

Signing off – stay safe and healthy and I’ll see you next week with a selection from Robert Seidel WHICH IS AMAZING. & don’t worry, before the month is out I’m gonna drop a bunch more than 4 movies. THANK YOU Kate Lain once again for letting me hijack.

BEFORE THE PORTRAIT

EPFC | July 29th, 2016

MARVELOUS MOVIE MONDAYS
Guest Curator: Christine Negus
Theme: The Trouble with Being Born

#4 – You Can’t Make it Out Alive

Karissa Hahn, Before The Portrait, 2012, 2:12 min.

Crawling through the piles of shit, tits scraping bottom, cuts and bruises, you come to a realization.

This isn’t the end. The feelings won’t last. You will have to carry onward and there will be so. much. more. pain.

But, right now, it doesn’t matter. You’re a fly AF mermaid.

Thanks again to Echo Park Film Center and Kate Lain. If I am ever asked back, my follow up program will be THE PLEASURES OF BEING A GHOST.

…because aren’t we all waiting for something good.

Goodbye Forever 🙂