Screening and Performance

Fits and Starts

7447 Sunset Boulevard (at Gardner Street), West Hollywood, CA 90046

Video screening and performance: Saturday, September 29, 8pm

On Saturday September 29 at 8pm, Agency will host an evening of video and performance. The screening will include works by Cortney Andrews, Lani Asuncion, Ursula Brookbank, Phoebe Collings-James, Carolyn Castaño, Anne Colvin, Jeseca Dawson, Michelle Handelman, Kelly Sears, and Gabi Vru. The event will also feature a performance by choreographer Christine Suarez who will present an excerpt of her new work Mother.F*cker.

Cortney Andrews, I Want to Love You (Part I), 2010

Cortney Andrews' I want to Love You (Part I) explores the nature of boundaries—between intimacy and violence, pleasure and pain, love and death. The female subject performs within these liminal spaces, forcing the viewer to question their own constructs of selfhood and otherness, lover and beloved, subject and object.

Lani Asuncion, Birth of Other Girl, 2011

In Birth of Other Girl, Lani Asuncion references Hawaiian oral traditions as she enacts a ritual of the mythical birth and rebirth of a woman descended from mythology and cultural constructions.

Ursula Brookbank, SHE WORLD.Enumeration, 2012

Ursula Brookbank’s SHE WORLD.Enumeration captures documentation of a three projector super8 film screening at Echo Park Film Center in 2012. Filmed at SHE WORLD, a Los Angeles based archive of relics and ephemera from the lives of women, the work searches for relationships and private histories emerging from objects in the archive. Multiple projectors are used to further the investigation between moments and memory.

Carolyn Castaño, Vanitas, 2009 

In Vanitas, Carolyn Castaño explores ritual, beauty, and aging through the private actions of two women.

Phoebe Collings-James, Heart Beet, 2009

Phoebe Collings-James, Sortir un Oeil, 2011

Phoebe Collings-James expresses frustration anxiety and the futility of violence in Heart Beet. With Sortir un Oeil she  focuses on language and sexuality as she plays with the symbolic slippage between the egg and the eye.

Anne Colvin, The Audition, 2008

Anne Colvin’s The Audition pieces together re-filmed fragments from Godard’s Contempt--one of those quintessential Nouvelle Vague films about film --into a monochromatic dreamscape of movement and re-recorded Stockhausen crescendo. The players are stuck in their bit part audition tirelessly waiting for rejection or inclusion.

Jeseca Dawson, Birthing Dinner, 2012

Jeseca Dawson’s Birthing Dinner is a highly visceral meditation on the cyclical nature of violence.

Michelle Handelman, Folly & Error, 2004/07

Folly & Error is part of  Michelle Handelman’s project This Delicate Monster, a multimedia pop fable inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil. Folly & Error are the twins Baudelaire refers to in his poems; like youth and age, pleasure and pain, happiness and sorrow, these twins are the great equation of life caught in an endless landscape of effort. Handelman transposes the Flowers of Evil into a contemporary pop landscape, creating a haunting and hallucinatory fragmented narrative that can best be described as a cross between between a pagan ritual and a fashion shoot gone terribly wrong.

Kelly Sears, Imprinted, 2011

Kelly Sears employs a light table, clear tape, and newspaper ink to render tracings of failed rapture, destructive tornados and other discord in 2011.

Christine Suarez, Mother.F*cker., 2012, Photo by:CedarBough Saeji

Mother.F*cker., a tour- de-force, dance-theater solo from Los Angeles-based choreographer Christine Suarez, fearlessly sheds light on the absurd and poetic life of a mother.

Gabi Vru, Dean and Chlorine, 2012

Inspired by John Waters and Kenneth Anger, Gabi Vru’s Dean and Chlorine portrays the limitations of two genders from a transgendered individual’s point of view. The title characters deny, ignore, and hate each other in a constant battle to be the dominant identity. In this struggle, there are no winners and the conflict continues without resolution.

 

The screening is presented in conjunction with the exhibit Fits and Starts which features work by Ursula Brookbank, Tricia Lawless Murray, Elizabeth Leister, and Cindy Rehm. The artists in this exhibit embrace the tactile and the visceral through varied media including installation, drawing, photography and video. Their projects are permeated by a bold physicality that reveals the body, both figurative and metaphoric, in a range of expressions from tenderness to aggression. The works investigate memory, identity, and desire through heightened materiality and haptic resonance.