The Black Radical Imagination 2015
THE BLACK RADICAL IMAGINATION 2015
Curated by Amir George and Erin Christovale in person
Doors 6:00pm / Screening starts promptly at 6:20pm
Tickets are free on a first come first served basis
The notion of the Black Radical Imagination stemmed from a series of discussions around the boundaries and limitations that are historically given to people of color in the realm of the cinematic.
Black Radical Imagination is a touring program of visual shorts that delve into the worlds of new media, video art, and experimental narrative. Focusing on new stories within the Diaspora, each artist contributes their own vision of post-modern society through the state of current black culture. An artistic movement and school of thought, Black Radical Imagination focuses on aesthetics of afrofuturism, afrosurrealism, and the magnificent through the context of cinema.
This screening is made possible by the generous support of Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre CFMDC, The Cinema Studies Student Union at U of T CINSSU, The Cinema Studies Institute at U of T, The Harriet Tubman Community Organization, The Images Festival, Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto LIFT, The Regent Park Film Festival, Toronto Animated Image Society, The Visual Studies Department at U of T, and WoodGreen Community Centre.
With films by JaTovia Gary, Amir George, Lauren Kelley, Terence Nance, and Cauleen Smith.
Just A Place, Amir George 1:38m, 2014, HD
Swimming in Your Skin Again, Terence Nance 25:12m, 2015, HD
Burlap Interior, Lauren Kelley 3m, 2013, 16mmHD
Froufrou Conclusions, Lauren Kelley 1:30m ,2011, 16mmHD
Crow Requiem, Cauleen Smith 11:09m, 2015, HD
An Ecstatic Experience, JaTovia Gary 6m, 2015, HD
Curators:
Amir George is a motion picture artist and film programmer born and bred in Chicago. Amir creates work for the cinema, installation, and live performance. His motion picture work and curated programs have been screened in festivals and galleries nationally and internationally. Amir is founder of The Cinema Culture, a grassroots film programming organization.
Erin Christovale is a curator based in Los Angeles focusing on film/video within the African Diaspora. She graduated with a B.A. from the USC School of Cinematic Arts and currently works at Film Independent. She also works with a collective of creatives and heady thinkers called Native Thinghood promoting young, upcoming artists of color.
Artists:
Cauleen Smiths interdisciplinary practice merges improvisational music, speculative fiction, African-American history, and processional forms to create temporal and spatial ruptures that make room for new affinities, empathies, and consciousnesses. Smiths films, objects, and installations have been featured in group exhibitions at the Studio Museum of Harlem, NY; Houston Contemporary Art Museum, TX; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, CA; D21 Leipzig, Germany; Yerba Buena Center for Arts, CA; and the New Museum, NY. She has had solo shows at The Kitchen in New York City, MCA Chicago and Threewalls in Chicago; and Women & Their Work in Austin,TX. Her work has also been featured in such high profile festivals as Sundance and screened twice by demand at the prestigious Robert Flaherty Film Seminar Exhibition. In 1999, she was selected as one of Ten Directors to Watch by Variety magazine. Smith is the recipient of several grants and awards including a Creative Capital grant, the Rockefeller Media Arts Award, Chicago 3Arts Grant, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Smith earned an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. She currently lives in Chicago while teaching at the Vermont College of Fine Art low-residency MFA program.
Lauren Kelley is a 2011 Lewis Comfort Tiffany Award recipient. In 2007 Kelley received the New Museums Altoids Award. She received her MFA in 1999 from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently, Kelley serves on staff at Prairie View A&M; University overseeing the universitys art gallery. She has been aresident of the Skowhegan School, the MFAH, and Glassell Schools Core Program as well as the Studio Museum in Harlem. Her work has been exhibited at the New Museum, New York, NY; Spellman College Museum of Fine Arts, Atlanta, GA; Sikkema Jenkins & Co. New York, NY, LACE, Los Angeles, CA, and Project Row Houses, Houston, TX. Reviews on her work have appeared in The New Yorker, Art:21 Blog, Art in America, ArtLies, Houston Chronicle, and Houston Press.
JaTovia Gary is an artist and filmmaker from Dallas, Texas currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Conjuring the aesthetics of AfroSurrealism, Garys work confronts traditional notions surrounding representation and identity through video art, documentary film, and performance while positing the concept of Black female subjectivity as a point of departure. Gary is a recent graduate of the Social Documentary Filmmaking MFA program at the School of Visual Arts. She is currently in production on her first feature film The Evidence of Things Not Seen, an experimental autobiographical documentary which explores notions of the self, Black American religious traditions, trauma, family, nostalgia and psychoanalysis.
Terence Nance is an artist born and raised in Dallas, Texas. He comes from a family of artists. Terence studied visual art and his practice includes installation, performance, music, and moving images. His first feature film, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, is an IFP Narrative lab alumnus and premiered in the New Frontier section of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. The film has garnered Terence recognition from Filmmaker magazine, where he was selected as one of the 25 new faces of independent film. Oversimplification also won the 2012 Gotham Award for Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You. In addition to his personal work, Terence is also an accomplished music video director having collaborated on short films and music videos with Blitz the Ambassador, Cody ChesnuTT, and Pharoahe Monch.
