Friday, May 18, 2012
8 pm.

$5 suggested donation

A bicycle powered puppet troupe touring through San Diego will present an all-ages sci-fi adventure tale that hints at the possibilities and necessity of a new culture of interdependency, sustainability, and subsistence, with handmade, human-powered infrastructure and media created by and for each other.

The two main characters are a young inventor/alchemist and her sidekick, a rescued bioengineering experiment gone wrong. After surviving a fiery chaotic crash of industrialization and capitalism, they resurface years later and reinvent the bicycle!

Co-curated by: the San Diego Guild of Puppetry and Animal Cracker Conspiracy

San Diego Space 4 Art
325 15th Street
San Diego, CA 92101

Children of Men, A Vision of Calamity and Rebirth

7 pm
$5 SUGGESTED DONATION
POPCORN & REFRESHMENTS AVAILABLE
Please feel free to bring your dinners but leave the kids at home.

About the Film:
The second installment of Craig Oliver’s Burn This Image film series will focus on Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 dystopian science-fiction adaptation Children of Men, based on the 1992 novel of the same name by PD James.  From Wikipedia: “In 2027, two decades of human infertility have left society on the brink of collapse. Illegal immigrants seek sanctuary in England, where the last functioning government imposes oppressive immigration laws on refugees. Clive Owen plays civil servant Theo Faron, who must help a pregnant West African refugee (Claire-Hope Ashitey) escape the chaos. Children of Men also stars Julianne Moore, Michael Caine, Pam Ferris, and Chiwetel Ejiofor.”

The screening of Children of Men will also include a showcase of and discussion about some of the influences on the film, one of the most ambitious of the last twenty years and one that shocked the studio system upon its release, as well as a look at Cuaron’s other groundbreaking work as a filmmaker, including  Y Tu Mama Tambien, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and the upcoming Gravity.

Cuaron’s painstakingly-detailed depiction of a society on the brink of collapse in Children of Men hit a little too close to home for some in the post-9/11 cultural climate, with direct references to war-torn refugees, the Abu Ghraib prison, and the Gauntanamo Bay detainee camp, among other things, handling it all with a cinematic verisimilitude that went completely against the normal standard for “action” fare.  We are killing each other, Cuaron seems to be pointing out, and without a regeneration, the end could very well be upon us before too long.  Come see why the film struck such a chord for viewers

About the Series:
Every so often, a film comes along and sneaks up on the general public, spreading through word-of-mouth wildfire, one in which a collective obsession is shared.  In Cinema’s grasp to provide entry into another world, only a certain few prove to truly immersive, tapping into the audience’s subconscious so deeply that viewers can’t help but watch these films many times over and gain new insight each time.  It’s that strange and magical collision of a filmmaker’s vision and intent and execution and the audience’s response, in which the space between is completely broken down and we can’t help but allow ourselves to be transported into a shared dream-state.  The Burn This Image film series seeks to take a good, long look at what it is about these films that provokes us and why we collectively give ourselves to them.

*Next Burn This Image JULY 14th. More details to follow.

Friday, May 11th, 2012
8:00pm – 10:00pm

$5 suggested donation

The prompt was simple: If you were to wake up and find out the world was ending in less than 24 hours, how do you live your last day? The product is a book detailing the passage of that day from morning to the end, told from the perspective of 22 different writers across the world, edited into one seamless story.

We’re proud of our first book and believe it’s important to share the process of making it with our community, rather than just wait until it’s done and then hocking it. That’s why on Friday May 11th, we’re inviting you to join us for the premier performance of Last Night On Earth, a work in progress, adapted into a live, staged radio play for your enjoyment. A talk back with the authors and editors will follow, and your feedback is greatly appreciated.

San Diego Space 4 Art
325 15th Street
San Diego, CA 92101

7:00pm
   May 6th, 2012

Space 4 Art
325 15th Street
San Diego, CA 92101

$5 suggested donation
RSVP on Facebook

When Grossmont College asked So Say We All to assemble a showcase of veteran writers to perform in concert with a visit from author Tim O’Brien, we wanted to make sure that everyone would get a chance to see and hear them. 8 voices were challenged with writing about the unseen and unpredictable side of war, what doesn’t make the movies, and what they have to say may surprise you.

Featuring:
• Jim Ruland
• Ronald Pickett
• Allen Clark
• Brian Simpson
• Rolf Yngve
• Rebecca Moos
• Alexa Steffen
• Justin Hudnall

A touring program of recent San Francisco Bay Area video shorts
May 3, 2012
7:30 to 10:30 pm
$5 Suggested Donation

Harkening back to the tripped out psychedelic lightshows of San Francisco’s 1960s counter culture as well as early Beat Generation experiments in stop motion animation, the artists included in Not Free, Not Dead pay homage to the Bay Area’s rich relationship with the moving image while simultaneously transcribing their fragmented technological experience onto these varied strategies and materials.

Ranging from narrative to music video to experimental – these mixed shorts are united by a visual vernacular specific to California.  Cobbled together from internet search words, these kaleidoscopic fragments are informed equally by subculture, the Bay Area’s rich underground film and video history as well as Hollywood’s cult classics and formulaic genres.

These hazy dreamlike states are populated by rock-and-roll devil horns, hang-loose hands and smiley faces floating freely alongside processed clips appropriated from major motion pictures. The darker side, a bad trip, emerges as surreal worlds give way to surreal worlds in a narrative buddy film and a horror flick, twisted from the mirrored, rainbow static of California’s once frontier landscape.

Featuring recent work by Caitlin Denny, Gregory Kaplowitz, Jen Kirsten, Alex S. Lukas, Jessica Miller, Dan Olsen, Skye Thorstenson, Virtual Pubes, and Nightmare City.

Facebook Event Page 

First Performance
Baskel & Clancy; Perpetual Doubt
April 27 & 28 7:30 pm

$7 ($5 Students)

Baskel & Clancy; Perpetual Doubt was born out of our desire to embrace the uncertainty that comes from allowing art and life to collide. What if performance was not a metaphorical conversation between audience and performers but an actual conversation? Perpetual Doubt attempts to merge conversation, physicality, artifice and experience to ask the question, “What are we doing here?” In this performance, Baskel and Clancy take on the challenge of listening and responding to one another, the audience and the world (this small part of it) in real-time.

Color Blank Space is a dance performance series featuring work that exists in the nameless space between reality and fiction. Utilizing both movement and spoken text, the work aims to leave the audience feeling more connected with themselves, to their immediate surroundings, and to the possibilities that exist in their imagination.

Alicia Peterson Baskel is artistic director and founder of the dance theatre company, Wallpaper Performance Co. She has been making dances in San Diego since 2003 and received her MFA in Dance Theatre from UC San Diego in 2011. Her choreographic work has been presented by numerous local presenters and recently, her work toured internationally to the Instituto de Clultura de Baja California in Tijuana, Mexico and the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space in Prague, Czech Republic.

More performance, dates, and details to follow

Mondays in April 11am – 1pm
4/2, 4/9, 4/16, 4/23, 4/30

Space 4 Art’s newest dance performance series Color Blank Space will be serving up daytime performances, A Month of Mondays, for those audience members who’d like to insert art into their daily routine. Every Monday for the month of April, Space 4 Art will be opening the gallery doors between the hours of 11am and 1pm, inviting art lovers to spend their lunch break watching/participating in a performance experiment. With the availability to come and go as one pleases over these two hours, Baskel and Clancy will be exploring their newest work, Perpetual Doubt. Audience is encouraged to bring their lunch or simply bring their attention as this duet attempts to break down the barriers between people and performance.

Baskel & Clancy; Perpetual Doubt was born out of a desire to embrace the uncertainty that comes from allowing art and life to collide. What if performance was not a metaphorical conversation between audience and performers but an actual conversation? Perpetual Doubt attempts to merge conversation, physicality, artifice and experience to ask the question, “What are we doing here?” In this performance, Alicia Peterson Baskel and Liam Clancy take on the challenge of listening and responding to one another, the audience and the world (this small part of it) in real-time.

Color Blank Space is a dance performance series curated by Wallpaper Performance Company in collaboration with Space 4 Art.

Photographer: Ursula Rothfuss

Immaterial Ergonomics brings together four artists from both coasts who share an affinity for material transcendence. Their innovative, contemporary work represents a range of hybrid practices: sculpted canvases, painted videos, printed sculptures and digital processes, which turn traditional mediums on their head. The four artists share a goal: to head toward representational objects, only to sidestep the familiar at the last moment. And drift past.

The work of Brice Bischoff, Ryan Perez, Matt Sheridan, and Maria Walker will be celebrated with an incredible reception that includes high-caliber music performance art by UC San Diego art teacher Michael Trigilio, and a one-night-only installation by San Diego artist Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli.

Inside:
Brice Bischoff is a Los Angeles-based artist who transforms photographs of natural settings into the surreal with experimental techniques. He received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2007. His work has appeared in exhibitions in New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C., St. Louis, Tokyo, and Warsaw. In 2007, he was a member of the art collective, Self Made, who ventured on a 22-city art tour across the United States and Canada. His work is in the collections of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art and has been featured in the textbook Pinhole Photography, Fourth Edition.

Ryan Perez, who was born in Oceanside but now lives in Los Angeles, received his BFA from Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design in 2008 and is currently an MFA candidate for the spring of 2012 at University of California, Riverside. He uses materials and techniques common to both commercial and art production. His sculptures and photographs attempts to speak towards how seduction and desire is located in both the mass produced and the art object. Acknowledging an affinity with the commercial, while slightly diverging from it, his work flirts with ideas dealing with the surface of high modernism and suggests hints of how the individual deals with mass industry/culture.

Matt Sheridan of Los Angeles works in animation, video installation, short film, painting and collage. His work focuses on the power relations between bodies and information. He received his MFA from Art Center College of Design. While working for MTV, Nickelodeon and the NBA, he also taught animation at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, the School of Visual Arts and Pratt Institute.  He has shown in the USA, UK, Brazil, Iran and India, the Netherlands and France. Matt Sheridan’s portion of Immaterial Ergonomics was made possible in part by an ARC grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation.

Maria Walker lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She builds complex stretchers that involve irregular pieces of wood poking out against the canvas. The canvas forms topography of peaks and valleys that the artist responds to with acrylic paint. The stretcher dictates the flow of water and acrylic paint across the surface to create the image; She received an MFA in 2006 from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, in Elkins Park, Pa.

Onstage:
Michael Trigilio (starvelab) is a multimedia artist, filmmaker, and co-founder of the long-running experimental Neighborhood Public Radio project. The starvelab music he will perform at Space 4 Art has been described as a rocket ship celebration across a thousand hallucinatory emotional landscapes. He recently showed work from his Speculative Religious Electronics project at Disclosed unLocation in South Park, San Diego, and was part of the Wireless exhibition at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum in November, 2011. He teaches courses in Media and Sound at University of California, San Diego. Some sounds and information are available at starvelab.com.

Outside (in the cubes):
Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli’s “My Pink Room” is an installation that will be up for one night only. Lavatelli works in installation, performance, and video to examine femininity and expectations in cinema— how moving image has fragmented realities and female identity. The Pink Room is a stage for the construction of an identity, just as girls fill their room with objects to dictate who they are with these accouterments of gender.

James Moore will perform a strange and beautiful program of new music for National steel string guitar, featuring new transcriptions of the music of Lou Harrison, premieres from Larry Polansky and Molly Thompson, and selections from John Zorn’s Book of Heads.

James Moore

Moore is a versatile guitarist with multiple musical personalities. Performing on a variety of acoustic and electric guitars, banjos, and home-made instruments, James combines the sensitivity and lyricism from his classical training with a healthy dose of improvisation, theatrics, and experimentation.

You may have found James in a variety of unique performance situations including the Wulf in downtown LA premiering amplified banjo compositions; at the Pompidous Center in Paris as an on-stage musician and speaker; at the Bang on a Can Marathon directing an orchestra of hearing deprived guitarists; at the Fringe Theater in Hong Kong presenting apocalyptic multimedia works; at the Performa Festival playing Fred Frith’s music for multiple table-top guitars; at the Kitchen performing alongside rock musicians Bryce Dessner, Sufjan Stevens and Glenn Kotche; at the Barbican Center in London playing the music of Michael Gordon with Alarm Will Sound; at the Whitney Museum performing the music of Christian Marclay with Elliott Sharp; at the World Financial Center performing on ukulele with the pop/chamber group Clogs.

James is a member and co-director of Dither, an electric guitar quartet that has been gaining international recognition for precision playing and creative programming. Other projects include the folk-noise group Oliphant, the experimental band Passenger Fish, and the conceptually extreme chamber music project Ensemble de Sade. His work for theater has brought him to perform with Jennifer Walshe’s absurdist botany and video game opera The Geometry, Jacob Cooper’s electronic pop-tragedy Timberbrit, and the European tour of Richard Maxwell’s otherworldly music-theater piece Neutral Hero. James also regularly performs with Object Collection, the resident experimental ensemble at the Incubator Arts Project, formerly playwright Richard Foreman’s Ontological Theater. Recent album releases include William Brittelle’s lip-synched pop collage Mohair Time Warp and Matt Marks’s Christian nihilist musical The Little Death, Vol 1 on New Amsterdam Records, and Dither’s self-titled debut on Henceforth Records.

James received his Master of Music in Guitar Performance from the Yale School of Music, and his Bachelor of Arts in Guitar Performance and Electronic Music from UC Santa Cruz. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and currently resides in Brooklyn, NY

Explosive Time is a performance art series organized by artists Kate Clark and Matt Savitsky. Grouped into three evenings, Explosive Time will present a spectral range of performances including barbershop quartet, conference calls, and a fertility ritual.

Session I : Ouroboros
Elizabeth Chaney, Benjamin Lotan, Andrew Printer, Erene Rallis

In Ouroboros, Session I of EXPLOSIVE TIME, artists Elizabeth Chaney, Benjamin Lotan, Andrew Printer, and Erene Rallis adopt a constellation of voices and personas to animate their individual narratives and research, suggesting that any information we translate is a creative treatment the actual. Within Ouroboros, so named for the symbolic character of a snake eating its own tail to self-generate a universe, we have gathered artists who build their identity and work through the emergence of innumerable voices.

April 6 at 7 pm
$5

Leslie García (México)

Works in the development of electronic art projects and digital media. Her work explores the process of fusion between art and technology, using techniques such as the production of virtual tools, developing of electronic prototypes, audio production, net art pieces design and generative visual codes. She is a co-founder of the DreamAddictive collective of electronic media in Tijuana Mexico from 2003 to 2010. She has exhibited her work in different festivals, individual and group shows, in collaboration with: Media Lab Prado, Museo de Arte Reina Sofía, Eyebeam, O1SJ Biennal, Museum of LatinAmerican Arts, Piksel Festival, Ars Electronica in mexico, Centro Cultural de España, Public Art Lab Berlin, NOMAD Center for Media Research, Museum of Contemporany Art in Szczecin, Transitio_MX and others. She received a grant from CENTRO MULTIMEDIA CMM 2010 and has been a fellow in the FONCA (national found for the culture and the arts) at the young artists program for the following editions 2009-2010 and 2011-2012. She currently teaches undergraduate digital media design at the University CENTRO.

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Upgrade! is an international, emerging network of autonomous nodes united by art, technology, and a commitment to bridging cultural divides. Its decentralized, non-hierarchical structure ensures that Upgrade! (i) operates according to local interests and their available resources; and (ii) reflects current creative engagement with cutting edge technologies. While individual nodes present new media projects, engage in informal critique, and foster dialogue and collaboration between individual artists, Upgrade! International functions as an online, global network that gathers annually in different cities to meet one another, showcase local art, and work on the agenda for the following year.