Friday 9.07.07 Films and Slides by Ellie Ga and David Gatten
1. About This Friday
1a. THE LINE UP
2. About David Gatten's Films
3. About Catalogue of the Lost (and other revelations)
4. About Ellie Ga's Arctic Expedition
5. About The Tara
6. About Ellie Ga
7. About David Gatten
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1. About This Friday
What: Screening and Discussion with Ellie Ga and David Gatten
When: Friday September 7, 2007
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor
When: 7:00 pm
Who: Free and Open To All
Please join us this Friday for an amazing evening of 16mm film and digital slides. We are lucky to have experimental filmmaker David Gatten and artist Ellie Ga sharing their work with us. Ellie will present a slide lecture she first presented at the Explorer's Club last spring and David will showing a number of his films. Both artists are interested in explorations of the lost and invisible, and both are fascinated with the archive and invested heavily in questions of material and media specifity in relation to notions of the poetic. This is a particularly exciting event given that Ellie Ga is leaving on an expedition to the North Pole on September 12th. The piece she will perform tonight documents something of a process of imagining an expedition to the North Pole. Given that her ideas will be radically altered by the experiences she is about to have--I hope you don't miss this opportunity to see the work of these two friends and to wish Ellie BON VOYAGE.
1a. THE LINE UP
Ellie Ga, The Catalogue of the Lost (and other revelations), 28 minutes
David Gatten, SECRET HISTORY OF THE DIVIDING LINE, 20 minutes
David Gatten, WHAT THE WATER SAID 1, 2, and 3 (1997-1998), 16 minutes
Discussion and Potluck
2. About David Gatten's Films
Over the last ten years David Gatten's films have explored the intersection of the printed word and the moving image, while investigating the shifting vocabularies of experience and representation within intimate spaces and historical documents. Through traditional research methods and non-traditional film processes, the films trace the contours of both private lives and public histories, combining elements of philosophy, biography and poetry with experiments in cinematic forms and narrative structures. Currently Gatten is at work on a series of nine films about letters, lovers, books, ghosts and the Byrd family of Virginia during the early 18th century.
In 2005 he was awarded a Fellowship from Guggenheim Foundation to continue his work on the SECRET HISTORY OF THE DIVIDING LINE, A TRUE ACCOUNT IN NINE PARTS film series. The first four films in the project were featured in “Views from the Avant Garde” at the 43rd New York Film Festival in Fall of 2005. In the Spring of 2006 Gatten’s latest Byrd film was included in the 2006 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
In the Fall of 2007 five of Gatten's recent films films, including two new works, will screen at the Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, the London Film Festival and The International Cinema Exposition in Montevideo, Uruguay.
3. About "The Catalogue of the Lost (and other revelations)"
"The Catalogue of the Lost (and other revelations)" is a work done in the lecture format. Comprised of 282 images and lasting approximately 28 minutes, Ellie Ga completed this work in 2007 during her tenure as artist-in-residence of the Explorers Club in NYC. "The Catalogue of the Lost (and other revelations)" focuses on the missing pieces of early exploration–lost places, people, and concepts as well as the successes and failures to document “the unknown.” This performance is both a romantic tribute to human desire to ascertain terra incognita, and an examination of the imperial/political impulses behind this romanticism.
4. About Ellie Ga's Arctic Expedition
In about 2 week's time I will be something like an artist-in-residence on board a polar schooner locked in the ice near the North Pole.
After spending a year in the Explorers Club's archives I now have the chance to generate my own first hand accounts of “the unknown” and what that means these days. The unknown may very well end up being a study on how everyday gestures and thinking patterns are altered. I imagine that much of my time will be taken up with ship maintenance: cleaning, cooking, assisting scientists in taking measurements and photographing weather conditions. Once a month I will be sending sound transmissions and narrations “back home” to Projekt 0047 in Oslo and Dispatch in New York City where people can drop by and listen to the reports.
5. About the North Pole and the Tara
The Tara has been drifting on the Arctic pack ice for a year and a half as scientists study the effects of climate change. Occurring every 40 years, 2007-2008 is an International Polar Year (IPY). Beginning in the late 19th century, IPY was initiated by the “advanced nations” of the world to join together as an international scientific body to study the Polar regions. Tara is one of the European Union’s contribution to IPY. Please visit taraexpeditions.org for more information on the expedition.
6. About Ellie Ga
Ellie Ga is an artist living in New York City. She received her MFA from Hunter College in NYC and is a founding editor of Ugly Duckling Presse. Under a fellowship from the Friends of the Hermitage Museum, she was a guest artist at the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia and has also been an artist-in-residence at Women’s Studio Workshop and The Newark Museum of Art. Her performances and installations have been shown in New York at the Swiss Institute-Contemporary Art, The Rubin Museum of Art,The Newark Museum of Art, Gigantic Art Space and at the Museen fur Gegenwartkunst, Basel, Switzerland. Her artist’s books have received funding from The National Endowment for the Arts and The Jerome Foundation and are in numerous collections including The Museum of Modern Art (NY), Yale University and The New York Public Library. " The Catalogue of the Lost (and other revelations)" has been performed recently at The Explorers Club, Gigantic Art Space and Polytechnic University.
5. About David Gatten
David Gatten’s films have been exhibited at museums and cinémathèques including the 2002 Biennial and “The American Century” at the Whitney Museum, Pacific Film Archive, Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Cinémathèque, Art Gallery of Ontario, Cinémathèque Française, Helsinki Film Co-Op, Museum of Contemporary Cinema in Lisbon, Millennium Film Workshop, First Person Cinema, Anthology Film Archives, Cinema Project and Chicago Filmmakers. His films have been screened at festivals around the world including Rotterdam, New York, London, Ann Arbor, Toronto, Onion City, Ottawa, Athens, Tokyo, Seoul, Bangkok, Impakt, Media City, Cinematexas, THAW, Chicago Underground, PDX, Images, Black Maria and others.
Gatten’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as in private collections in the United States, Canada and Japan.
Gatten was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1971. Shortly thereafter his family moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, where he lived for 20 years. Gatten received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
For more information on David's films see davidgattenfilm.com
