Wunderkammern: The Private Life of Objects, by Erika Suderburg

Sunday June 7, 2015, 7:30 pm

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

Wunderkammern: The Private Life of Objects, by Erika Suderburg

At the Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90028

World Premiere! 

Erika Suderburg in person!

Filmforum is delighted to welcome back Erika Suderburg for the world premiere of her newest film!  Wunderkammern: The Private Life of Objects (2014, digital, 91 minutes) examines acquisition, objects and what a contemporary Wunderkammern (cabinet of curiosities) might reveal about desire, knowledge, materiality and memory. Fabricated out of objects contained in an existent fifty-year-old Cabinet of Wonders, Wunderkammern leaves no object untouched, no dust mite comfortable and no item microscopically unexamined. Organized alphabetically for sanity’s sake the film activates a series of associations, arcane, eccentric, playful and expansive. Ever unfolding, yet carefully constructed to facilitate your perusal, Wunderkammern: The Private Life of Objects takes you on tangents yet to be imagined, springs coils tightly wound, unnerves the inanimate and vitalizes cultural detritus. You will look at the objects that surround you with a newfound appreciation, animist suspicion, perspectival acumen and a regained sense of wonder. We invite you to get lost with us.

Tickets: $10 general, $6 students/seniors; free for Filmforum members.  Available by credit card in advance from Brown Paper Tickets at http://bpt.me/1592360 or at the door.

For more event information: www.lafilmforum.org, or 323-377-7238

 

Biographies:

Erika Suderburg is a filmmaker and writer. She has written art, performance, television and film criticism over the past thirty years for many publications including Xtra, AfterImage, ArtWeek, Art Issues and The New Art Examiner. She is co-editor with Michael Renov of Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, and editor of Space Site Intervention: Situating Installation Art, both published by the University of Minnesota Press. Her book Resolution 3: Global Networks of Video co-edited with Ming-Yuen S. Ma was published in 2013 by the University of Minnesota Press. .  Her areas of specialization and interest include: Art theory, Queer Theory, film and television criticism, video, film and digital production and imaging, Installation and Site-Specific art, sound art, film and video history, American and European experimental film and video and the intriguing and entrancing work of Denis Diderot, Gilles Deleuze and Michel De Certeau. She has worked as a curator for The American Film Institute, KCET PBS, Los Angeles, OutFest, Filmex International Film Festival, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (L.A.C.E.), and The Women’s Building.

Erika Suderburg’s films have examined the veneer of political language and historical narrative and its interjection into "private life," the friction between the public and private sphere and the images and texts that are constructed in order to label, classify, give witness to and identify the self in relation to societal constructs. In short this work is based in the stories we tell ourselves in order to live and the objects that anchor them. She is interested in devising, simulating, inventing and interrogating the textual and visual narratives we construct in order to mourn, to celebrate, to know, to ignore, and to forget.

Theoretically and formally Suderburg often employ the concept of a model universe or an all-encompassing archive, the creation of sites of material debris; clues, shards, and patterns that leave object traces. Cabinet of Wonders (Wunderkammern) embodies these sites in compact form. The work is based on an ongoing interest in the collecting impulse and consistently employs the miniature to reference these notions of the explicative model or master narrative as a way of exploring our desire to participate in and categorize experience through images and fabricated environments. Several loci reoccur as investigatory catalysts: the natural history museum, photographs and models as memory debris, the ennui of travel narratives, military and national archives, nomadic constructs, theatrical stage sets, landscape as metaphor, and repetitive historical and political amnesia. Wunderkammern: The Private Life of Objects adds another core sample to this investigative collection.

She began making experimental film and video in 1978 and was fortunate to study with Kinji Akagawa, David Antin, Tom DeBiaso, Michel de Certeau, Ken Feingold, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Allan Kaprow, and Moira Roth. She has made eight feature length films and myriad short films and videos that have been exhibited in Korea, Japan, Greece, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Canada, France, Singapore, Australia, Mexico, Qatar, China, Holland, Egypt, Sweden, the Netherlands, Brazil, Japan, and the UK.  Her work is distributed and published by System Yellow in Los Angeles and V-Tape in Toronto. She has been on the faculties of the California Institute of the Arts, Art Center-Pasadena, the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, New York and the Otis-Parsons School of Art & Design in Los Angeles. She is currently a faculty member at the University of California, Riverside located in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies. Information, filmography, clips, installation images and links to all her current projects can be found in updated form at: http://erikasuderburg.com/

 

Of composer/performer Eleonor Sandresky's work, Michele Branwen of HoustonArts, praised, “Her vision has a freshness and unusualness that has become rare in the avant-garde scene, and her delivery  is captivating and true.”  Eleonor's work encompasses the acoustic, the electronic, multimedia, the improvised and the through-composed, including music for virtuoso soloists and large ensembles, cabaret, art songs, and evening-length collaborations. Her music has been featured in film at Cannes, among other film festivals, and can be heard on Koch International, One Soul Records, ERM Media’s Masterworks of the New Era series, and Albany Records, as well as Bandcamp and CDBaby. She has been a composer-in-residence at STEIM in Amsterdam, at The MacDowell Colony in New England, USA, and at the festival in Hvar, Croatia, among others.

Working at the forefront of avant-garde concert-as-theater, Eleonor has reinvented herself as a Choreographic Pianist with her evening-length composition, A Sleeper’s Notebook, that she premiered  at the Kitchen as a part of the Composers Collaborative, Inc Keyboard  Summit in 2003. In it she explores her deep interest in how motion translates to emotion through sound, a hyper-emotional experience for the audience and the performer. Steve Smith has this to say in TimeOut NY about the piece, "A Sleeper's Notebook maps in vivid detail a nocturnal  terrain in constant flux." To fulfill her desire to generate sound when she moves, she invented, with engineer/composer Michael Clemow, the Wonder Suit, a wireless sensor system that she wears. This adds another layer to the experience of composing and performing these works.  

Current commissions include a NEW WORK for Parthenia, a consort of viols, and baroque harp, choreographed. The piece is based on the poetry of John Dunne and will be premiered  in 2015. In the 2013/14 season Eleonor embarked on a new collaborative journey with six composer/performers, creating a series of concerts where they collaborated in various ways, from creating and improvising new work to creating new versions of existing pieces. The series will continue at Spectrum in NYC in the Spring of 2015. In addition to that, she performed updated versions of The Mary Oliver Songs Book 1 for choreographed pianist and Wonder Suit, as a part of the Musical Ecology series in Brooklyn, NY and premiered a new composition, IN SHORT Db for open ensemble as a tribute to the 50th anniversary of Terry Riley's IN C in NYC. Her music has been heard on three continents, from the Philadelphia Fringe Festival to the Totally  Huge New Music Festival in Perth, Australia.

She is at the same time one of New York’s pre-eminent new music pianists, with performances and premieres  of new works by a wide range of composers  from Egberto Gismonti to Philip Glass. She has recorded  for CRI, Nonesuch, One Soul Records, New World Records, Mode Records, and Orange Mountain Music, and plays concerts throughout the world. As a music director, she has led ensembles in a variety of theatrical settings, from dance performances with Susan Marshall to conducting to film with the Philip Glass Ensemble, of which she was a member from 1991 - 2004.