HANNAH PIPPER BURNS: HIJACKED MASTERY, METAPHYSICAL MUNDANITY

Hannah Piper Burns' video work stakes claim to and adopts the imagery of text, pop music, and dislodged scenes from classic cinematic musicals. Among her “mash ups” are If I Were a Man (2008), juxtaposing the swagger and grace of the Jets and Sharks with the question “if I were a man, what kind of man would I be?”; Over the Anvil (2009), which pits Gene Kelly dancing against one wondering “Do I have it in me, enough for us both?”; Mermaid Blues(2009), which combines the aquatic dancing of Esther Williams with an ongoing inner dialogue about “the lifecycle of an identity”; and Outer Darkness and Skincare Tips (2016), which utilize commercials and mass media television to explore connections between content, viewer, and personal subjectivities.  

Hannah Piper Burns makes and curates experimental media that is shown all over the US and Canada, including at the Walker Art Center and HAIR + NAILS in Minneapolis, the Nightingale and Tritriangle in Chicago, the University of Wisconsin and Microlights in Milwaukie, the Winnipeg Film Group and the Winnipeg Underground Film Festival in Manitoba, the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles, and online at ACRETV.org. Raised in Maryland and forged in San Francisco, Portland has been her home since 2009 and there, she has recently exhibited at the Northwest Filmmakers Festival, the Portland ‘Pataphysical Society, A/V Party at Open Signal, and the Say When mini-festival. Right now, she radically re-edits reality television, gives live multimedia snail facials, co-hosts a semi-annual experimental video game showcase called ALTcade, and over the past five years has co-founded and co-directed both a local film festival (EFFPortland) and a live/work project space (Compliance Division). Her solo show “Venus Retrograde” will be on view at the Portland Art Museum from February - August 2018 as part of the APEX series curated by Grace Kook-Anderson. She writes for Fandor.com, practices casualdivination, and enjoys Jazzercise.  

November 13th, 2018

Grand Illusion Cinema 

7:00 pm

Group Show

Our annual Group Show this year will have a global theme. We will feature filmmakers from our international EXquisite corpse projects, films that mark the 50 yr anniversary of the global political unrest of 1968, and the 100 yr anniversary of the end of WWI. Films include Elena Pardo’s De la Naturaleza del Hueso, 2018, based on student protests in Mexico City that took place before the 1968 Summer Olympics, Salise Hughes’ Yugoslavian Home Movies, 2014, which includes 1968 footage of Belgrade students protesting Communist elitism under Tito, Aaron Valdez’s The Life and Times of Robert F. Kennedy Starring Gary Cooper, 2006, Salise Hughes’ War to End War: Joie de Guerre, 2018, Insa Langhorst’s Sulamit, 2017, Rafael Balboa’s Intermezzo, 2006, Kate Lane’s Fifty Feet Over Wendover (For Nancy Holt), 2018, Brian Short’s Recursive, 2018, Charles Chadwick’s Gibber Eidolon, 2018, and Kathleen Quillian’s The Conjure, 2018.

October 16th, 2018
Grand Illusion Cinema
7:00 pm

An Invisible College: Experimental Shorts, 1936 - 1978

Co-presented by EXcinema and The Sprocket Society
Various / 80min / 16mm

A selection of outstanding 20th century experimental shorts, culled from the secret vaults of The Sprocket Society. Rare 16mm film prints of pioneering animation, abstraction, visual music and collage by such masters as Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye, Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker, Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart, Jim Davis, Douglass Crockwell, Arthur Lipsett and others.

In the 1600s, a network of proto-scientists and "natural philosophers" (and a few occultists) came together as The Invisible College -- an "institution without walls" with no fixed home or declared identity, dedicated simply to furthering knowledge through experimental investigation. Together, they helped lay the groundwork for modern science.

In the 20th century, another "Invisible College" coalesced: a very loose web of artists and creative scientists (and a few occultists), working alone yet inevitably influenced by each other, who dedicated themselves to advancing movies through experimental investigation. Together, they discovered entirely new forms of visual expression, and laid the groundwork for modern cinema.

This program pays tribute to some of these latter-day alchemists, with a non-denominational selection of rare 16mm film prints curated by Spencer Sundell, offering a snapshot of breakthroughs that transformed movies, and thus how we see the world.

September 11th, 2018
Grand Illusion Cinema
7:00 pm

ARCHEOPSYCHIC TIME ZONES: New Films & Videos by Georg Koszulinski

This collection of short experimental works attempts to engage the history of colonization in the Americas, primarily through intersecting and overlapping time zones that span from thousands of years into the past, to 6.5 million years into the future, when humankind has found a way to travel to the edge of the known universe. Works in this collections may employ science-fiction tropes and other fictive story structures in order to make truth claims about the historical world. Works in this collection may employ flicker film experiments to psychologically challenge the viewer's conception of social and historical reality. Works in this collection may be surrealist experiments in observational documentary, or personal essay films on highly impersonal topics. This program includes a live soundscape performance.

June 5th, 2018
Grand Illusion Cinema
7:00 pm

EMULSION MANIPULATIONS II

Guest curator Jon Behrens brings a collection of films by friends including: Caryn Cline, Ryan K. Adams, Steve Demas, Ruth Hayes, Linda Fenstermaker, Merie Menken, Jim Davis, and others.
April 24th, 2018
Grand Illusion Cinema
7:00 pm

THE SPACES BETWEEN COUNTRIES: MEXICO & USA

EXcinema presents our 4th annual Exquisite Corpse Cinema, The Spaces Between Countries: Mexico & USA. For this edition we asked twenty filmmakers, half from Mexico, half from the US and a few who live, or lived in both to make short films that will connect exquisite corpse style into one feature length film. Each filmmaker addresses life in their surroundings and many include events of the past year. For instance there’s crowds on both US coasts under the path of the eclipse, independent vendors making tortillas and thread from scratch, a beach full of pelicans, the aftermath of earthquakes in Mexico, and hurricanes and forest fires in the US. There’s police in the streets, resistance marches, real estate scammers, and there’s the housing crisis affecting most of us. This and much more. For more information on how the corpse is made check out the Exquisite Corpse Cinema link on our blog.
Made with the support of 4Culture.

Filmmakers are: Brenda Avila, Ivan Avila, Rafael Balboa, Anthony Buchanan, Brenda Contreras, Sasha Water Freyer, Ivonne Fuentes,  Elijah Hasan, Dalia Huerta, Salise Hughes, Pedro Jimenez, Roberto Lopez, Pam Minty, Artemio Narro, Eric Ostrowski, Elena Pardo, Chloe Reyes, Luke Seiczek, Bruno Varela, Dustin Zemel

Watch Trailer






March 27th, 2018
Grand Illusion Cinema
7:00 pm

UNTITLED (JUST KIDDING)- JESSE MALMED

Untitled (Just Kidding) is an ever-evolving suite of films and performative interjections made over the last half decade.

The works play in creative reading, studied density, the one-(hundred)-liner, choirs, screen texts, the bootleg, the cover, jokes, speculative etymologies, accents, loops, the cinemagical, body swaps, poetry, citation and human voice. Conceptually engaged, language-intensive and visually mesmerizing, the suite scrambles somewhere in the intersects of conceptual comedy, dizzying illogics, the poetic plu-future and sustainable sourcing. Through deliberate mistranslation and strategic denaturing of languages and codes, Malmed revels in and reveals their extra-communicative potential as sound, as image, as object, and shift audiences’ concepts of the show, of the cinema.

Screening to include collisions and confoundments between textual forms—written, spoken, sung and otherwise enunciated; variations on versioning; shifting registers of spectatorial engagement; jokes that are poems that turn out to be videos. Unexpect the expected.

Selected press about Untitled (Just Kidding) :

WDCB's The Art Section, Chicago Reader, Incite, South Side Weekly, Gapers Block

Jesse Malmed is an artist and curator living and working in Chicago. His work in moving images, performance, text and occasional objects has exhibited widely in museums, cinemas, galleries, bars and barns, including recent and upcoming solo presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, San Francisco Cinematheque, Microlights, Echo Park Film Center, and the University of Chicago Film Studies Center. His platformist and curatorial projects include the Live to Tape Artist Television Festival, programming at the Nightingale Cinema, instigating Western Pole, the mobile exhibition space and artist bumper sticker project Trunk Show (with Raven Falquez Munsell), programming through ACRE TV and organizing exhibitions, screenings and performance events both independently and institutionally. Originally from Santa Fe, he earned his BA from Bard College and his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he currently teaches. www.jessemalmed.net

March 26, 2018

Grand Illusion Cinema

7:00 pm