[AIR videos] Wago Kreider & Alison Crocetta

HARVESTWORKS DIGITAL MEDIA ARTS CENTER PRESENTS:

2003 ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE

Wago Kreider's MENAGERIE OF THE CITY &
Alison Crocetta's REVEAL/CLEAR/FILL

MONDAY, November 10th at 7pm & 9pm
596 Broadway, Suite 602, NY, NY 10012/
corner of Broadway & Houston
Subway: Broadway/Lafayette (F/V), Bleecker (6), Prince St. (N/R)
212-431-1130 (p), 212-431-7693(f)
http://www.harvestworks.org /
contact Carol Parkinson: 212-431-1130

This event is free to the public.

Wago Kreider presents selections from a suite of short experimental videos entitled MENAGERIE OF THE CITY. In a series of photographic shocks flashing an image of the fixed-explosive, MARVELOUS CREATURES signals the uncanny correlation of erotic and destructive impulses. They bear witness to a primordial trauma, confusion between the animate and the inanimate, the biological and the mechanical, Eros and Thanatos. In GAZA BOOK OF LONGING, a woman yearns for the climate of her homeland in the landscape of a botanical conservatory driving the memory of dispossession. Her search and discovery of a solitary olive tree in the metropolis reveals a longing that cannot be bound by artificial constructions. The tree and the woman struggle within the space of captivity to reconcile the reciprocal relationship between support and display as they find themselves lost in a land of others' far away from home. GAZA was co-directed by Jessica Allee and Shane Flores. Formally referencing the flicker films of the late 60s against a narrative backdrop of the doomed marriage of a Hollywood starlet and an African prince, TO HUG YOU AND SQUEEZE YOU constructs an imaginary "honeymoon safari." Kreider takes home movies of a wedding ceremony and splices it with film clips of animals in captivity.

Wago screened work at the London Film Festival, the Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival in Chicago, the DUMBO Film & Video Festival in New York, the Dallas Video Festival, the Backup New Media Festival in Weimar and at the ICA in London. This year he received an Experimental Television Center Artist-in-Residency, an Individual Artist Grant from the Queens Council on the Arts in New York, and was a Talent Campus resident at the Berlin Film Festival. Kreider lives in New York and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design.

Alison Crocetta introduces several of her former installation and performance projects, which provides context for her recently completed short films. Afterwards, she will screens her Super 8 mm black and white films entitled REVEAL, CLEAR, AND FILL that explore the relationship between the human body, its actions and the built environment. Each film's sound track was recorded at Harvestworks and edited into DVD format. These filmed performances occur in a built structure that Crocetta refers to as a "headspace". This headspace becomes a place where the boundaries between body, clothing, and architecture are blurred. Crocetta's films celebrate the impermanent nature of physical actions and mental notions and examine their impact on sculptural form and psychological states within the constructed headspace.

Alison earned a BFA from Alfred University and an MFA in sculpture from Tyler School of Art. She was also awarded a fellowship to study at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Crocetta is currently the Associate Chair of the Foundation Department at Parsons School of Design. She has taught at Tyler School of Art, Washington University and Alfred University. Her work has been exhibited in recent years at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Harvard University, Spaces in Cleveland, Ohio, and The Birchfield-Penney Art Museum in Buffalo, New York. Crocetta has been the recipient of the Bunting Fellowship at The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a NEA Regional Award in Sculpture.

Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1977 to foster the creation of digital media works. The Artist In Residence Program is funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the NYC Dept. of Cultural Affairs, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, JPMorgan Chase Foundation and the Greenwall Foundation.