Works by Stephanie Barber, Olivia Ciummo, Mary Helena Clark, Roger Deutsch, Taylor Dunne, Janis Crystal Lipzin, Ben Rivers, Jonathan Schwartz and April Simmons

Admission: [$5 members / $10 non-members]
Festival Pass: [$25 members / $50 non-members] available here
Order advance tickets for this program here

CROSSROADS 2013 is sponsored by Ninkasi Brewing and Cole Hardware
thanks to promotional partner Oddball Film+Video

SCREENING:
HEALING (2012) by Stephanie Barber; digital video, color, sound, 12 minutes, from the maker. world premiere.
“The video hovers tentatively between therapy, documentary, poetics and mystic traipsery and ends, like all good things, in surrender to song. There is a challenge presented (the challenge to engage earnestly with the piece as it requests) to fall into the breathing and pacing presented, and the challenge to view the video as a discrete piece of art at the same time. The piece relies heavily on the text, the disembodied Virgil through which the words become musical, instructive and (due to the absence of image) visual. The video is a gift for my friend Blaster Al Ackerman who sent me many stories and poems about the ‘tiny yellow hairs’ who make themselves briefly present at the end of the video.” (Stephanie Barber)

Phantoms of a Libertine (2012) by Ben Rivers (UK); 16mm, color, sound, 10 minutes, print from the LUX. bay area premiere.
“Glamorous destinations are hand-scrawled in ink beside black and white photographs: Acapulco, Haifa, Marseille, New York. Fragments of fading figures are taped to the yellowing pages of the album. This was a life documented and remembered, but the man who made the album departed a year ago. Now his flat sits silent and heavy, crammed with animistic artifacts, books, collages of broken stone figures, collected and created over decades spent traveling the world for Time & Life Magazine. The photo albums are fragile and threaten to fall apart, the talismans are removed from their intended rituals, the dust is more dominant, more all-consuming, than the sense of a living present. Since the departure of its occupant, the flat has become a museum, rather than a mausoleum, a shrine to what has past.” (Ben Rivers)

In Reps of Long-Play (2013) by Olivia Ciummo; digital video, color; sound, 7 minutes, from the maker. bay area premiere.
“The curtain opens and Greek pillars mark an entry point to staged happenings. The imagined stage actors command movement as the director controls stillness and points out spots for the viewers to look.” (Olivia Ciummo)

Prelude (2011–2012) by Roger Deutsch; digital video, color, sound, 7 minutes, from the maker
“A prelude constructed from other preludes. A prelude to a love story. A love story.” (Roger Deutsch)

Micro-Celluloid Incidents in 4 Santas (2012) by Janis Crystal Lipzin; digital video, color, sound, 10 minutes, from the maker. bay area premiere.
“The moment-to-moment flow of familiar public amusements in Santa Cruz, Santa Monica, Santa Clarita and Santa Rosa CA is exposed through a kind of 21st-century ‘perceptiscope,’ a device used by Ray L. Birdwhistell and Jacques D. Van Vlack in their legendary film, Micro-cultural Incidents in 10 Zoos.
“What can be shown and what can be known?” (Janis Crystal Lipzin)

The Plant (2012) by Mary Helena Clark; digital video, color, sound, 8 minutes, from the maker. bay area premiere.
“A spy film built on the bad geometry of point-of-view shots.” (Mary Helena Clark)

Animals Moving to the Sound of Drums (2013) by Jonathan Schwartz; 16mm, color, sound, 9 minutes, print from the maker. world premiere.
“That fall it was not intentional to have a Galway Kinnell book on the table near where the caterpillar in the doorway, feeding on our offerings, became the butterfly, feeding on honey water, staying in our house until we let it go. Or it was not known about the deer in Putney or that the baby birds in the raspberry bushes would cry to us in summer. A beloved, old friend once visited Vermont to do some work for Galway Kinnell and she described a stone table in the field where they ate meals in the afternoon—it sounded like a perfect song and so I looked at the book and from Little Sleep’s-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight here is that line: ‘The still undanced cadence of vanishing.’” (Jonathan Schwartz)

Corn Mother (2012) by Taylor Dunne; 16mm, color, sound, 6 minutes, print from the maker. bay area premiere.
“My mother’s last visit to her garden captured on a single cartridge of Super-8 film and blown up to 16mm. Hand-scratched text borrowed from the Wabanaki legend The Corn and Tobacco Mother.” (Taylor Dunne)

Sticks and BirthStones (2012) by April Simmons; digital video, b&w, sound, 14 minutes, from the maker. bay area premiere.
Children whisper through overgrown gardens, hide in darkened interiors, waiting for the rain to come.
Invisible bodies may become visible in the dark... apparitions, auditory illusions, spectres, phantoms, are all intangible, none of them, for instance, could be photographed. (Camille Flammarion, The Unknown, 1900)