About Us | Videopolis 2013 | Past Videopolis Participants
About Us
In an effort to promote explorations into the tangible boundaries of the moving image the Metro Gallery presents Videopolis, a video installation exhibition with limited selected performances. Held across the street from the Charles Theater during the Maryland Film Festival, we hope to feature work that doesn’t make more traditional festival formats. Videopolis hopes to juxtapose various forms of film and video, along with other mediums that comment upon or investigate the moving image, together in a relaxed environment for the enjoyment of artists, festival-goers and random passers-by. With people on all sides of the lens exploring how different disciplines may work together the results are expected to be innovative and entertaining. To encourage creative interaction amongst as many people as possible the entire process will be without fees. This year May 9th – 11th, 2013, the Videopolis video installation exhibition will open with performances in the evenings, and run through the rest of the month of May.
Videopolis is a not-for-profit enterprise between a volunteer staff of co-curators and the Metro Gallery in Baltimore, MD. We are generally filmmakers and artists as well, and just want to enjoy the whole thing. If you want to contact us you can at film@themetrogallery.net
Videopolis 2013
Featuring video installations by
Kevin Blackistone, Bennii D., Katie Duffy, Leo Hylan, Jason Irla,
Ryan Murray, Katherine Nonemaker and Maggie Schneider
Curated by Guy Werner
Thursday, May 9th and Friday May 10th, 2013
Opens at 7pm, Performances at 9pm
The Metro Gallery
1700 N. Charles St.
Baltimore, MD 21201
FREE Admission!
Featuring audiovisual performances May 9th by
Darsombra, Sassoon, Kristen Anchor, Jonathan Badger and Meg Rorison
Sight Unseen presents an Evening of Expanded Cinema May 10th
with audiovisual performances by
Thomas Dexter, Jeff Donaldson and Greg St. Pierre
ABOUT VIDEOPOLIS:
In an effort to promote explorations into the tangible boundaries of the moving image the Metro Gallery presents Videopolis, a video installation exhibition with limited selected performances. Held across the street from the Charles Theater during the Maryland Film Festival, Videopolis features work that doesn’t make more traditional festival formats. Videopolis hopes to juxtapose various forms of film and video, along with other mediums that comment upon or investigate the moving image, together in a relaxed environment for the enjoyment of artists, festival-goers and random passers-by. With people on all sides of the lens exploring how different disciplines may work together, the results are expected to be innovative and entertaining. This year May 9th – 11th, 2013, the Videopolis video installation exhibition will open with performances in the evenings, and run through the rest of the month of May.
VIDEOPOLIS OPENING NIGHT – MAY 9th
The Metro Gallery presents the 6th annual Videopolis festival featuring video installations and audiovisual performances by Darsombra, Sassoon, Kristen Anchor, Jonathan Badger and Meg Rorison.
ABOUT THE INSTALLATION ARTISTS:
Kevin Blackistone
Kevin Blackistone was almost the best Baltimorean, according to the City Paper “Best of Baltimore” reader’s poll three years running. Currently holding the title for “Best Troublemaker”, Kevin bides his time while participating in numerous stage productions, the Red Emma’s collective, and generally assisting in any number of counter-culture events in the city. Graduating from UMBC, Kevin has been a visual artist melding film, photography and digital imaging.
Bennii D
Baltimore native Bennii D has been working with animation since his graduation from UMBC in 2002. He has shown in numerous festivals, won 3 Telly awards, 2 Communicator awards and been nominated for an Emmy. A dreamer by nature, Bennii D. strives to create other worlds with his art and turns the gears of the digital age to create mind-bending looks into alternate realities.
Katie Duffy
Katie Duffy is an interdisciplinary artist from Chicago. Duffy currently lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland, where she is an MFA candidate in the Mount Royal School of Interdisciplinary Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Duffy graduated from Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa and served two years in AmeriCorps. Through the use of short non narrative videos Duffy simultaneously mocks and attempts to understand. Utilizing humor she turns a critical eye towards the social, political and religious entities that have created the complex backlash towards American feminism. The use of her own body as figure connects her personal experiences to these wider issues, locating herself within centuries of systems that created the secondary status of women.
Leo Hylan
Leo Hylan is a multimedia artist, video artist (Installation and VJ), and electronic musician from the Baltimore / Washington area. He holds have a B.F.A. in New Media from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a Master’s in Art Education from Goucher College, and is currently pursuing a second Masters degree in Goucher’s Masters of Digital Arts Program. He is currently the Digital Media Instructor at the Performance and Visual Arts Magnet School in Annapolis, Maryland where he currently resides. He has shown at many galleries including the Chesapeake Arts Center, Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts, BWI Airport Gallery, The Herring Run Network, and the Studio of the Arts.
Jason Irla
Jason Irla is an interdisciplinary artist whose work exploring issues of time, perception and memory. Born in 1975 in Detroit, Michigan, he received his BA from Bennington College in 2008 and his MFA in interdisciplinary studio art from the Mount Royal School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2010. Jason has exhibited throughout the United States and was an artist-in-residence at The Wassaic Project in 2012. He currently lives in Farmington, Maine with his wife and fellow artist Chloe Watson, and is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Maine at Farmington.
Ryan Murray
Ryan Murray was born in Pittsburgh, PA. He creates videos, performances, sculptures, music, and paintings. His work deals with the connections and disconnections between scientific rationality, psychedelic mysticism and pop culture. He has exhibited artwork across the United States, in gallery exhibitions, in video screenings, at public performances, and in books. Murray currently serves as an Assistant Professor in Towson University’s Electronic Media and Film Department.
Katherine Nonemaker
Katherine Nonemaker makes prints, paintings, drawings and books in Baltimore, MD. She graduated from Towson University and enjoys highways, construction sites, manipulating negative space, and Hellenistic philosophy. Her painting, illustration and design clients include the National Hellenic Museum, the US Army, and Pyramid Skateboards. Katherine works as the Arts Editor for Open Lab Magazine, and maintains the Open Lab art blog.
Maggie Schneider
Maggie Schneider is a Baltimore-based, multimedia artist with a primary focus in video and performance. Currently, she is a MFA candidate at Maryland Institute College of Art and dances with the Effervescent Collective. This summer, some of her video work will be exhibited in Seattle, WA as part of Interstitial Theatre’s Mobile Screen tour and she is a dancer/performer in the Rooms Fall Apart play, part of the Transmodern festival. Her present body of work consists of videos, dance/performance, and installation, all of which analyze physicality, investigate space, and facilitate intervention of her body in various environments.
ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE ARTISTS:
Darsombra
If we can invent the term “transcendental rock”, then let’s apply it to Darsombra, Brian Daniloski and Ann Everton’s audiovisual music project. Daniloski, a veteran of heavier, sludgier, grittier rock bands such as Meatjack and Trephine, controls the sound of Darsombra, alternating between mammoth vocal swells and soundscapes and searing guitar riffs, leads, loops, and samples. Take one part metal, one part psychedelic rock, one part experimental, and a dash of prog and krautrock, and you begin to have an idea why Darsombra, as music, needs its own genre. But there is more than just Daniloski’s sonic world at play here–video artist Everton takes his work to the next level by bringing her Darsombra-induced visions to the stage through her kinetic psychotropic video projections, creating a constantly shifting backdrop to Daniloski’s live performances.
Kristen Anchor
Kristen Anchor is a longtime resident of Baltimore and is about to graduate with a MFA from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. After graduating from UMBC with a degree in Film and Video she worked as the Director of Creative Alliance MovieMakers for the first decade of its existence – curating the screenings
program and producing programs and workshops to support local filmmakers and the filmmaking community in Baltimore. Anchor is a frequent panelist, moderator and presenter for film and video events and organizations, including: Maryland Film Festival, Experimental Television Center (Owego, NY), Morgan State University, Mix NYC, Art Institute of Portland, Hallwalls (Buffalo, NY), and MicroCineFest (Baltimore). As a video/installation artist, Kristen literally pushes the boundaries of film by stressing film loops as they are projected and creating live soundtracks to films she creates.
Sassoon
Adam T. Rush and Grayson Brown deliver chunky, downtempo grooves while Branden Rush orchestrates live visuals to create an immersive dance experience. These Baltimore underground regulars are anything but predictable, blending genres and mediums while delivering a consistently fun live show.
Jonathan Badger
Jonathan Badger is a guitarist, composer and video artist. He studied music with Stephen Jaffe, Scott Lindroth and John Harbison at the Duke University Graduate School of Music. His work ranges from postrock sludge to neobaroque chamber music. Often his performances include the use of a distinct video projection system. Using Max/MSP and Jitter, along with a number of other highly technical video augmentation programs of his own design, Jonathan’s guitar will define what eyes will see and minds shall experience.
Margaret Rorison
Margaret Rorison is a writer and filmmaker from Baltimore, Maryland. She combines language, sound and imagery to create installations, films and live projections. Her work is often developed from extensive walks through rural and urban landscapes, combining moving images, field recordings and text. She is interested in the live dialogue between music and film and often projects her films accompanying sound artists. Rorison’s work has been screened at venues throughout the USA and in Europe. She holds an MFA from The Maryland Institute College of Art and is co-founder and curator for a new film series, Sight Unseen that focuses on bringing experimental films and expanded cinema to venues throughout Baltimore. She also is a member of The Red Room Collective, which curates experimental and improvised concerts in Baltimore.
SIGHT UNSEEN PRESENTS AN EVENING OF EXPANDED CINEMA – Friday May 10th
Sight Unseen has teamed up with The Metro Gallery to present an evening of expanded cinema as part of the 2013 Videopolis festival featuring performances by Thomas Dexter, Jeff Donaldson, and Greg St. Pierre.
These three artists retroactively use analogue technologies to create their improvised live performances, often subverting the original functions of their chosen media. Through tearing apart technology, destroying film stock, and re-purposing hardware, these artists defy the conventional modes of how to use their equipment. This practice results in the creation of unique, aesthetically contemporary visuals, allowing the artists to refute the notion that their technologies are becoming obsolete while offering a vision for the media’s future.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS & PERFORMANCES:
THOMAS DEXTER
Thomas Dexter is a Brooklyn-based artist and performer. In work spanning film performance, single channel video, sound, and installation, Dexter explores compositional systems which upend normative configurations of image and sound, signal and noise, illusion and material. Through drawing attention to unfamiliar overlaps, folds and breaks in sensory experience, Dexter’s work attempts to explore the perceptual structures that frame the commonplace.
Dexter’s solo and collaborative projects have been featured at Microscope Gallery, Experimental Intermedia, PS1, Roulette, The New York Museum of Art and Design, Sight and Sound Festival, Issue Project Room, the Mononoaware Festival, The Lesley Heller Workspace, Festival of Ideas for the New City, The Invisible Dog, Splatterpool, and ESP TV.
SQUARE/GETS/THE/CIRCLE is an expanded cinema performance involving light-to-sound synthesis, a prepared projection surface, and the destruction of the film.
JEFF DONALDSON a.k.a. noteNdo
Jeff Donaldson is an audio/visual artist who has been working with feedback systems since the late 1980s. At the beginning of the new millennium, Donaldson began applying the concept of feedback to video game systems, transforming them into generative audio/visual instruments. Since publishing his video work online, Donaldson has exhibited internationally as well as helped to pioneer the fields of video bending and glitch aesthetics.
Infinite Regress is a real-time audio/visual improvisation generated with a Panasonic video mixer. For Infinite Regress, the video output signal is split into two signals: one signal is sent to an audio processing device and the other is sent back into the video input of the Panasonic creating a feedback loop.
Audio and video are therefore perceived as an abstract continuum which is guided live. What one sees is what one hears and what one hears is what one sees.
GREG ST. PIERRE
Greg St. Pierre is a video artist and live visual performance artist based out of Baltimore, MD. He works with custom systems of his own design, analog video equipment, and analogue video synthesis modules to create immersive environments, interactive installations, and video performances in collaboration with the scores of many artists. Greg has collaborated with many different musical acts including Dan Deacon and Animal Collective and has performed with them in many different venues and festivals internationally.
GSP’s performance at Videopolis will involve his newest analogue video synthesizer and a composed experimental score.
ABOUT SIGHT UNSEEN:
Sight Unseen is a roaming monthly screening series established in July 2012 showcasing experimental film, video, and live cinematic performance. This series invites recognized pioneers and emerging innovators of moving image media to participate in screenings and performances throughout Baltimore. The intentions of these installations engage diverse communities and distinguished venues with the prominence and potential of the moving image. Sight Unseen contemplates alternative modes of time-based art and challenges the pursuits of its audience. The series is programmed by Margaret Rorison, Lorenzo Gattorna, & Kate Ewald and has been developed in part by support from the 2012 MICA Launch Artists in Baltimore Award.
For more information on the performances and artists, please visit http://www.sightunseenbaltimore.com/
And http://www.themetrogallery.net/videopolis
Past Videopolis Participants
2013 will be the sixth year of Videopolis, and years past have included screenings of shorts and even features in addition to installations and performances. Artists that have taken part in past Videopolis festivals include but are not limited to; Fabrice Métais, MacKenzie Peck, Nick Prevas, Ryan Murray, Sandy Triolo, Linda Franklin, Julie Benoit, Michael Ivan Schwartz, Justin Nethercut, Luke Rollins, Lloyd Lowe Jr., Brinson Renda, Bethany Dinsick, Julia Kim-Smith, Riki Kim, Alexandra Gilwit, Jim Doran, Robby Rackleff, Michael Bartolomeo, Jerry James, Miranda Pfeiffer, Bernard Stiegler, Bardot, Rahne Alexander and Jaimes Mayhew, Kevin Blackistone, William Dewald, Lilly Pop, Hannah Brancato, Jackie Wang, Mark Brown, Brian Morrison, SYSTEM D-128, Matthew Fishel, Chang Deng-Yao, Liz Donadio, Phil Davis, James Amoeba, Bennii Denrich, Alan Resnick, Lurch and Holler, Julia Oldham, Catherine Pancake, Violet Hour, Jenny Graf, Shana Palmer, Andy Hayleck, Paul Neidhardt, Susan Alcorn, Liz Downing, J.Wallace Parker, Franciska Farkas, Diana Gross, Amy Genevieve Kozak, Matt Szychowski, Armando Valle, Nathan Meyer, The Robinson Brothers, Jennifer Hardacker, Madam X and the Human Being Society, Benjamin Rosenthal, Charles Fairbanks, Corrine Bot, Andrew Mausert-Mooney, Geoff T. Graham, Wide Angle Youth Media, Guy Werner, Thom Stromer, DrewTube, Dubpixel, Bardot, Adrian Bond and Joanne Juskus, Mathew Bainbridge, Kevin Blackistone, Red Star KGB, Adam Smith, Geoffrey Kixmiller, Gideon Chase, Mobtelevision, Jason Dove, James Hollenbaugh, James Roden, Stephen DeCubellis, Jim Bianco, DireWit Films, Morgan Showalter, Jane Cottis, Becka Dowding, Katherine Boule, Glenn Nelson, Joel Haddock, Emma Walters, Brendan Sullivan, Brady Starr, Tuffnerd, Suzzi Skripkina, Emily Slaughter, Amy Mann, James Robert Brasic, Selina Loper, Eric Dyer, Rachel Dwiggins, Bradley Hunter, Kate Ewald, Jason Irla, Olivia Robinson, Daniela Kostova, Chip Irvine, Meg Rorison, Jordan Bernier, Kristen Anchor, John Shea, Corrine Bot, Eric Smallwood, Holden Brown, Nautical Almanac, Christine Ferrera, Adam Schwarz, Meg Rorison and many more. Our apologies if you’re not listed.
