On Site: Sun, Salt, Spiral

May 22

Doors 6:30, program at 7:00

Free

Sun, Salt, Spiral is a film cycle devoted to the work of artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, who together expanded the material and spatial conditions of artmaking. Consisting of solo and collaborative films as well as adjacent cinematic tributes by moving image artists, these programs collectively engage with their creative legacies in the late anthropogenic moment. 

May 22

Pine Barrens (Nancy Holt, 1975, 30 min, 16mm > digital file)

For the Time Being (Deborah Stratman, 2021, 7 min, HD video)

Amarillo Ramp (Bill Brown & Sabine Gruffat, 2017, 24 min, Super 16mm, HD video)

TRT: 61 min

Post-film discussion with artist Eirik Johnson

MAY 22

Pine Barrens

Nancy Holt

1975, 30 min, 16mm > digital file

"Pine Barrens is concerned with evoking through film a barren wilderness in south-central New Jersey. The camera is always in motion — tracking, pivoting, and walking through the landscape. Though they are never seen in the film, the voices of the local people, the 'Pineys,' are heard relating their feelings about the land, their attitudes about city life, their myths of the area, etc. their voices and the music of 'Bill Patton's Pine Barrens Trio' add a psychological dimension to the landscape." — Nancy Holt [EAI]

For the Time Being

Deborah Stratman

2021, 7 min, HD video

A video letter to artist Nancy Holt, in homage to our shared interest in terminal lakes, framed views, monuments and time. Filmed on and around the Great Salt Lake, Mono Lake and Meteor Crater.

The title is taken from a piece Holt wrote for Robert Smithson in 1978 which reads in full: For the time being, in the interim, in the course of time, from day to day, from hour to hour, until, in due time, and in the fullness of time, time endures, goes on, remains, persists, lasts, goes by, elapses, passes, flows, rolls on, flies, slips, slides, and glides by. 

Deborah Stratman

Amarillo Ramp

Bill Brown, Sabine Gruffat

2017, 24 min, S16mm, HD video

A portrait of sculptor Robert Smithson's final earthwork. Employing filmmaking strategies that are both responsive to the artwork's environmental context and informed by Smithson's own art-making strategies, the filmmakers encounter the Ramp as an observatory where human scales of space and time are set against geological and cosmic scales.

Artist Bios - 
Nancy Holt (April 5, 1938 – February 8, 2014) was a member of the earth, land, and conceptual art movements. An innovator of site-specific installation and the moving image, Holt recalibrated the limits of art. She expanded the places where art could be found and embraced the new media of her time. Across five decades she asked questions about how we might understand our place in the world, investigating perception, systems, and place. Holt’s rich artistic output spans concrete poetry, audioworks, film and video, photography, slideworks, ephemeral gestures, drawings, room-sized installations, earthworks, artists’ books, and public sculpture commissions.  

Born in Worcester in Massachusetts, Holt grew up in New Jersey. She graduated with a degree in biology from Tufts University, Massachusetts in 1960. Later that year she moved to New York City where she met the artist Robert Smithson; the two were married on June 8, 1963. The places Holt lived remained important to her: New Jersey is the site of Stone Ruin Tour (1967), Pine Barrens (1975), and Sky Mound (1984-); and Massachusetts the location of Underscan (1973-74) and Spinwinder (1991). Her earliest exhibitions were in New York: the first group presentation Language III at Dwan Gallery in 1969, and the first solo in 1972 at l0 Bleecker Street. In 1968 Holt made her first journey to the American West. The Great Basin Desert, Utah is where her landmark earthwork Sun Tunnels (1973-76) is located. In 1995 Holt made Galisteo, New Mexico her home.

Born in Passaic in New Jersey, Robert Smithson (January 2, 1938—July 20, 1973) was an artist who expanded what art could be and where it could be found. For over fifty years his work, writings, and ideas have influenced artists and thinkers, building the ground from which contemporary art has grown.

An autodidact, Smithson's interests in travel, cartography, geology, architectural ruins, prehistory, philosophy, science fiction, popular culture, and language spiral through his work. In his short and prolific life, Smithson produced paintings, drawings, sculpture, earthworks, architectural schemes, films and video, photographs and slideworks, writings, and all the stops between. From his landmark earthworks to his “quasi-minimalist” sculptures, Nonsites, writings, proposals, collages, detailed drawings, and radical rethinking of landscape, Smithson's ideas are profoundly urgent for our times. By exploring the conceptual and physical boundaries of knowledge Smithson raised essential questions about our place in the world.

Artist Eirik Johnson @orcawatch will join us for a post-film discussion

Photographic artist Eirik Johnson (b. 1974) makes conceptually-grounded work examining the intersections of contemporary environmental, social, and cultural issues both in America and abroad. Employing various modes of presentation from photobooks to experiential photo and sound-based installation, Johnson’s photographic projects explore the marks and connections formed in the friction of this complicated relationship.

https://www.eirikjohnson.com/

In addition to monthly film screenings, On Site will present related workshops and speakers to explore interdisciplinary connections between artists and artworks through practical application and heuristic process.

May 18 Artist workshop: Sky of Earth with Shannon Eakins

1:00pm - 4:00pm

Free

Registration required, email us at info@minimartcitypark.com to confirm your spot

Light snacks provided 

Use earth (pigment colored clay) to create your own slice of sky. In this hands-on workshop, we will be exploring the illustrative potential of nerikomi techniques- stacking multiple clay bodies together to create patterns and gradation- and attempting to bridge sky and earth.

Artist Shannon Eakins is the Creative Director for Slush Club, designing and building custom ceramic dinnerware in her studio. Slush-club.com@slushclub_ceramics

On Site: Sun, Salt, Spiral

May 8

Doors 6:30, program at 7:00

Free

Sun, Salt, Spiral is a film cycle devoted to the work of artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, who together expanded the material and spatial conditions of artmaking. Consisting of solo and collaborative films as well as adjacent cinematic tributes by moving image artists, these programs collectively engage with their creative legacies in the late anthropogenic moment. 

May 8

Spiral Jetty (Robert Smithson, 1970, 36 min, 16mm> digital file) 

Swamp (Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, 1971, 9 min, 16mm> digital file) 

Sun Tunnels (Nancy Holt, 1978, 26 min, 16mm> digital file) 

TRT: 67 minutes

Spiral Jetty

Robert Smithson 

1970, 35 min, 16mm > digital file

The film Spiral Jetty is a "portrait" of Smithson's monumental earthwork of the same name at Rozel Point in the Great Salt Lake, Utah. Completed in April 1970, Spiral Jetty is an iconic earthwork and Smithson's most renowned piece. At 1500 feet long and 15 feet wide, Smithson's spiral of basalt rocks, mud, and salt crystals juts out from the shore and coils dramatically into luminous red water. The film documents the making of this earthwork, which has attained near-mythic status as it has disappeared and then re-emerged from the lake over the past decades. A voiceover by Smithson illuminates the ideas and processes that informed the evolution of the work, with allusions to prehistoric relics and radical notions of space, scale and landscape. [EAI]

Swamp

Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson

1971, 6 min, 16 mm > digital file

Swamp is a collaborative artwork by Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, shot in the swamplands of New Jersey. This 16mm film explores the mechanics of seeing through site, core concerns of both Holt and Smithson. Looking through the viewfinder of a Bolex camera focused in tight close-up, Holt attempts to walk through the landscape—her field of vision through the camera too narrow for steady progress. A visceral, chaotic journey unfolds as the artists confront a dense maze of plant life, struggling with the limitations of their own perception, and for the failure of technology to stand in for vision.  [Holt/Smithson Foundation]

Sun Tunnels

Nancy Holt 

1978, 26 min, 16mm > digital file

Sun Tunnels is a twenty-six-minute film showing the making of Holt’s eponymous earthwork Sun Tunnels, located in the Great Basin Desert, Utah. Sun Tunnels comprises four concrete cylinders arranged in the landscape in an X formation, each 18 feet long and 9 feet diameter, perforated with a constellation of small apertures emitting patterns of light inside the tube. In its portrait of an earthwork, this film shows Holt’s precise process and careful attention to site, place, time, and perception. [Holt/Smithson Foundation]

Artist Bios - 

Nancy Holt (April 5, 1938 – February 8, 2014) was a member of the earth, land, and conceptual art movements. An innovator of site-specific installation and the moving image, Holt recalibrated the limits of art. She expanded the places where art could be found and embraced the new media of her time. Across five decades she asked questions about how we might understand our place in the world, investigating perception, systems, and place. Holt’s rich artistic output spans concrete poetry, audioworks, film and video, photography, slideworks, ephemeral gestures, drawings, room-sized installations, earthworks, artists’ books, and public sculpture commissions.  

Born in Worcester in Massachusetts, Holt grew up in New Jersey. She graduated with a degree in biology from Tufts University, Massachusetts in 1960. Later that year she moved to New York City where she met the artist Robert Smithson; the two were married on June 8, 1963. The places Holt lived remained important to her: New Jersey is the site of Stone Ruin Tour (1967), Pine Barrens (1975), and Sky Mound (1984-); and Massachusetts the location of Underscan (1973-74) and Spinwinder (1991). Her earliest exhibitions were in New York: the first group presentation Language III at Dwan Gallery in 1969, and the first solo in 1972 at l0 Bleecker Street. In 1968 Holt made her first journey to the American West. The Great Basin Desert, Utah is where her landmark earthwork Sun Tunnels (1973-76) is located. In 1995 Holt made Galisteo, New Mexico her home.

Born in Passaic in New Jersey, Robert Smithson (January 2, 1938—July 20, 1973) was an artist who expanded what art could be and where it could be found. For over fifty years his work, writings, and ideas have influenced artists and thinkers, building the ground from which contemporary art has grown.

An autodidact, Smithson's interests in travel, cartography, geology, architectural ruins, prehistory, philosophy, science fiction, popular culture, and language spiral through his work. In his short and prolific life, Smithson produced paintings, drawings, sculpture, earthworks, architectural schemes, films and video, photographs and slideworks, writings, and all the stops between. From his landmark earthworks to his “quasi-minimalist” sculptures, Nonsites, writings, proposals, collages, detailed drawings, and radical rethinking of landscape, Smithson's ideas are profoundly urgent for our times. By exploring the conceptual and physical boundaries of knowledge Smithson raised essential questions about our place in the world.

casting a glance

James Benning | 2007 | 81 minutes | 16mm projection | 16mm print courtesy of Canyon Cinema

A cinematic tribute to, meditation on, and historic simulation of Robert Smithson’s monumental earthwork, Spiral Jetty, conceived within the shifting ecology of the Great Salt Lake.

A landscape portrait told in 80 stationary takes, casting a glance is also a structuralist ode to artist Robert Smithson, whose vision of moving 6,500 tons of earth, rock, and algae into a vast coil on Utah’s saltwater, terminal lake would emerge as one of the great earthworks of the last century.

This is the first event of "Sun, Salt, Spiral", a series of film screenings and workshops devoted to the work of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson that continues at Mini Mart City Park in May.

On Site is curated by David Dinnell, Ellen Ito and Jay Kuehner

This program is proudly supported by Seattle Department of Neighborhoods.

De/Compose 12-4 PM

FREE

Walk-ins encouraged 

This workshop invites participants to transform salvaged materials, looking to the process of composting for inspiration. How can a thing be taken apart, reconsidered, and reassembled? Can it be cut, shredded, knotted, punctured, folded? From upcycling textiles to food packaging, participants are encouraged to bring materials to contribute to our ‘compost’ pile.

This workshop takes participants through three stages: Decompose, Redistribute, and Compose. 

Participants decompose materials at one station, and compose them into something new at another.  In the middle is our shared and redistributed resources— what will grow from this fertile blend? 

On Site, the moving image series at Mini Mart City Park returns with two back-to-back screening events on March 3 and 4, both featuring works by artist Kevin Jerome Everson, the majority of which have never before been screened in Seattle.

March 4

Ten Five In The Grass: A Field Guide to Kevin Jerome Everson Solo and Collaborative Films (TRT 88 min).

The work of artist Kevin Jerome Everson evinces a singular vision across a broad swath of American life. Often focusing on the physical and material contours of labor, Everson exercises a commensurately keen eye on competitive sport, depicting the athlete in frequently unceremonious - yet no less dignified states of practice. This includes his Black Fire collaborations with co-director Claudrena N. Harold.

The work of Kevin Jerome Everson (b. 1965, Mansfield, Ohio;  lives and works in Charlottesville, VA) has been the subject of mid-career retrospectives and solo exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Modern, Cinema du Reel, and Centre Pompidou, among others. He has screened his films at international film festivals and museums including Sundance, Toronto, NYFF, Berlinale, Rotterdam, Black Star, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington D.C. His films have been featured at the 2008, 2012 and 2017 Whitney Biennial, the 2013 Sharjah Biennial, the 2018 Carnegie International and the 2023 Contour Biennale.

FULL PROGRAM INFO HERE

© Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; trilobite-arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures

Special thanks to Kevin Jerome Everson, Kahlil I. Pedizisai, Claudrena N. Harold and Madeleine Molyneaux / Picture Palace Pictures

On Site, the moving image series at Mini Mart City Park returns with two back-to-back screening events on March 3 and 4, both featuring works by artist Kevin Jerome Everson, the majority of which have never before been screened in Seattle.

March 3rd screening at SIFF Film Center, March 4th at Mini Mart City Park

Expanding engagement with cinema via screenings and interdisciplinary programs

On Site is curated by David Dinnell, Jay Kuehner and Ellen Ito and presented in collaboration with Mini Mart City Park. This project is funded in part by a Neighborhood Matching Fund award from Seattle Department of Neighborhoods. @seattle_neighborhoods 

March 3

Kevin Jerome Everson: Solo and Collaborative Films

A program of recent films (2019-2024, 16mm presented digitally, TRT 65 min).

Kevin Jerome Everson and collaborator Kahlil I. Pedizisai will be in attendance.

Eleven of Everson’s recent short films will be presented including Practice, Practice, Practice, 2024, a portrait of Richard Bradley who tore down the Confederate flag flown at City Hall in San Francisco in 1984; Hazel, 2023, a fictionalized recreation of Eddie Hazel's famous 10-minute guitar solo on the Funkadelic song “Maggot Brain”;and Glenville, 2020, where Kevin Jerome Everson and Kahlil I. Pedizisai update the 1898 film Something Good- Negro Kiss, which features the first representation of African American intimacy in cinema history.

March 4

Ten Five In The Grass: A Field Guide to Kevin Jerome Everson Solo and Collaborative films

(TRT 88 min).

The work of artist Kevin Jerome Everson evinces a singular vision across a broad swath of American life. Often focusing on the physical and material contours of labor, Everson exercises a commensurately keen eye on competitive sport, depicting the athlete in frequently unceremonious - yet no less dignified states of practice.  This includes his Black Fire collaborations with co-director Claudrena N. Harold.

The work of Kevin Jerome Everson (b. 1965, Mansfield, Ohio;  lives and works in Charlottesville, VA) has been the subject of mid-career retrospectives and solo exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Modern, Cinema du Reel, and Centre Pompidou, among others. He has screened his films at international film festivals and museums including Sundance, Toronto, NYFF, Berlinale, Rotterdam, Black Star, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington D.C. His films have been featured at the 2008, 2012 and 2017 Whitney Biennial, the 2013 Sharjah Biennial, the 2018 Carnegie International and the 2023 Contour Biennale. 

Kahlil I. Pedizisai is a multi-media artist/documentarian working in the mediums of photography, film, and audio. He has worked as director, cinematographer, assistant director, and sound recordist over the past three decades including several collaborations, since 2007, with Kevin Jerome Everson. Pedizisai is currently an Artist-in-Residence and Professor at Linfield University in Oregon.

FULL PROGRAM INFO HERE

© Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; trilobite-arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures

Special thanks to Kevin Jerome Everson, Kahlil I. Pedizisai, Claudrena N. Harold and Madeleine Molyneaux / Picture Palace Pictures

Roger Beebe returns to Seattle for the first time in a decade with a new program of 16mm multi-projector performances celebrating the 25thanniversary of his first touring program.  

“Beebe’s films are both erudite and punk, lo-fi yet high-brow shorts that wrestle with a disfigured, contemporary American landscape.” --Wyatt Williams, Creative Loafing

The program features several newer works (un arbre (2024, 4 x 16mm + video), Lineage (for Norman McLaren) (2019, 4 x 16mm), de rerum natura (2019, 3 x 16mm + video), Home Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry (2021, 4 x 16mm), alongside some of his best-known projector performances (including the seven-projector show-stopping Last Light of a Dying Star (2008/2011).  He will also include a sampling of recent essayistic videos, presented as live-narrated documentaries. These works take on a range of topics from the forbidden pleasures of men crying [Historia Calamitatum (The Story of My Misfortunes)] to the racial politics of font choices (The Comic Sans Video) and the real spaces of the virtual economy (Amazonia).

Roger Beebe is a filmmaker whose work since 2006 consists primarily of multiple-projector performances and essayistic videos that explore the world of found images and the "found" landscapes of late capitalism. He has screened his films around the globe at such unlikely venues as the CBS Jumbotron in Times Square and McMurdo Station in Antarctica as well as more likely ones including the Sundance Film Festival and the Museum of Modern Art with solo shows at Anthology Film Archives, The Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City, and Los Angeles Filmforum among many other venues. Beebe is also a film programmer: he ran Flicker, a festival of small-gauge film in Chapel Hill, NC, from 1997-2000 and was the founder and Artistic Director of FLEX, the Florida Experimental Film Festival from 2004-2014. He is currently a Professor in the Departments of Art and Theatre, Film, and Media Arts at the Ohio State University.

Artist Reception Sat, January 11

2 - 8 pm, Artist Talk at 5pm 

We had the unique opportunity of closing out 2024 by hosting glass and mixed-media artists Bri Chesler and Minhi England as our Mini Mart City Park Artists-in-Residence. Over the last month, they’ve been working onsite, side-by-side, repurposing material and reimagining previous works for their exhibition BO(U)ND, opening this Saturday, January 11. 

BO(U)ND is a study on how relationships alter and shape our identities. Despite the lack of conscious consent, experiences cling to our psyche binding us through one another. 

The Liquid Lush Girls is an artistic collaboration between two best friends, Bri Chester and Minhi England, who bonded through shared life experiences, offering a fresh take on trauma bonding. The duo forged their friendship in a male-dominated industry, standing out as the only women on the factory floor. When they began sharing their personal stories, they were astonished to discover the many parallels in their childhood and family backgrounds. This connection inspired them to create what is now known as The Liquid Lush Girls. 

While both Bri and Minhi work independently, they also collaborate on projects, finding that their life experiences continue to overlap alongside their artistic endeavors. Despite their distinct artistic styles, their partnership creates a new, unified vision, as demonstrated in Delectable, an immersive installation at METHOD Gallery in 2023. Their residency at Mini Mart City Park offers another opportunity for them to push the boundaries of their individual practices while working side by side.

Red May Seattle & MMCP present Users Guide to Claire Fontaine

A conversation with author Anita Chari and Jaleh Mansoor.

SUNDAY, JUNE 2ND
2:00 PM

A User’s Manual to Claire Fontaine

Critical Theorist Anita Chari explores the work of the feminist conceptual artist collective Claire Fontaine through the lens of her theoretical and political innovations, both inside and outside the context of contemporary art. Theorizing the ways in which Claire Fontaine’s experimental approach can illuminate a more haptic, embodied practice of critical theory, Chari delineates a series of theoretical techniques and procedures at the core of the artist’s work, among them defunctionalization, Institutional Critique, human strike, tactile mimesis, desubjectivation, détournement, magic materialism, and feminist materialism. Join her in conversation with art critic and historian, Jaleh Mansoor (Marshall Plan Modernism).

Cyanotype workshop Saturday, May 11, 12:00 and 1:30

Come join local artist Steven Miller for a hands-on cyanotype workshop on Saturday, May 11.

Miller will guide participants through the entire process of making a cyanotype, from photo capture to creating a negative and print to take home.

Workshop space is limited to 10 per session. RSVP HERE.
Photographic equipment required: Please bring your smartphone or digital SLR.

Steven Miller's art has been exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries and museums, and his photographs are featured in the public collections of the Tacoma Art Museum, Northern Georgia College and State University, and Seattle's Public Art 4Culture, as well as numerous private collections

See Steven Miller’s work on view in the current Mini Mart City Park exhibition, Face Off
All images courtesy of the artist

On Site is a moving image series rooted in senses of place, focusing on contemporary and historic artists’ cinema. The series draws from a diversity of works that commonly recruits cinematic form to attend enduring and ephemeral environments.

April 25, Doors 6:30 Screening at 7:00 PM

Free

Eventide

Sharon Lockhart, 2022, 4K Video, 34 mins

In what is both a culmination and a departure, Sharon Lockhart’s latest film, Eventide (2022), is a  meditative, non-narrative long shot that uses choreography to explore landscape, communal  relations, solitary searching, psychic endurance, and the play of light moving through darkness.  Locating drama in the real-time shift of evening fading into night, this is perhaps Lockhart’s most  optical and painterly moving image to date, composing figures, scenography, and soundscape into  allegory and abstraction. The artist’s investment in forms of dance in previous works is felt here too  as the initial appearance of an individual slowly builds into a culture and a gathering. An astounding  number of stars emerge bright in the dusking sky, blazing as a distant corollary to the growing  constellation of roving bodies scanning the rock-strewn beach by cell phone light for what we do not  know. The streaking of shooting stars and gliding of satellites throws the otherwise measured pace  into relief. Shot on the Swedish coast with a close-knit group of friends Lockhart has been involved  with for years, Eventide is concerned with the future and what it might hold.  (Lockhart Studios)

Curated by David Dinnell, Ellen Ito, Jay Kuehner

David Dinnell is a film programmer currently living in Seattle. He is the former Program Director of the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Media City Film Festival and the Tacoma Film Festival. He has curated film programs for the Flaherty Film Seminar, The Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento (Buenos Aires), UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art (NYC), Canyon Cinema 50, among others. He is co-founder and co-curator of Mur Murs, an ongoing Los Angeles-based series presenting artists and cinema.

Ellen Ito is an artist, programmer, and curator raised in the Lower Duwamish Valley. Current projects include the exhibition Soft Power, on view at TAM through September 2024. Ellen is the Curator of Special Projects at the Tacoma Art Museum.

Jay Kuehner is an independent film critic, curator, and educator based in the Pacific Northwest whose focus is on creative nonfiction and documentary practice. His work has appeared in Cinema Scope, Senses of Cinema, Film Comment, IndieWire and Sight and Sound.

Image caption:

Sharon Lockhart

EVENTIDE

2022

single-channel HD video installation (color/sound)

34:32 min.

© Sharon Lockhart, 2022

courtesy the artist, neugerriemschneider, Berlin, and Gladstone Gallery

For tickets click here!

Click here for tickets and more info…

On Site is a moving image series rooted in senses of place, focusing on contemporary and historic artists’ cinema. The series draws from a diversity of works that commonly recruits cinematic form to attend enduring and ephemeral environments.

February 29, Doors 6:30 Screening at 7:00 PM

Free

Garden in the Machine

A program of short films literally and metaphysically grounded in nature, taking terra firma as a point of inception and departure, of loss and renewal.  

Program length 80 mins. 

Yaangna Plays Itself

Adam Piron

2022 / Kiowa, Mohawk / 7 min

An anguished ode to the noble sycamore tree (El Aliso) that once stood at the heart of the Indigenous Gabrieleño village of Yaangna, from which the city of Los Angeles would grow. A sensory, profilmic blast derived entirely from elements at the original site and nearby Los Angeles River.

To Pick a Flower

Shireen Seno

2021 / Philippines, Japan / 17 min

From the image of a faded photograph a Filipina bride is seen in a white gown posing not beside a groom but rather a potted plant, an enigma investigated in this quietly composed photo essay on the botany of empire during American colonial occupation. Seno’s taxonomy of native flora – trees such as Balete, Eucalyptus, Molave – questions historical hierarchies, and resounds like a eulogy to the land and its people. 

Bloom

Samuel M. Delgado Helena Girón 

2023 / Spain / 18 min

An archipelagic excavation of mythic San Borondón, an island in the Canarias, submerged and reappearing through the centuries. A cinematic expedition - via otherworldly 16mm and digital footage - recovers the land-beneath-the-sea from seeming oblivion.

When Light is Displaced

Zaina Bseiso

2021 / Palestine, US  / 6 min 

A simple orchard in Los Angeles is subtly transformed into an arena of multigenerational memory, as a filmmaker draws parallels with the fate of the Jaffa orange and stories of Palestinian diaspora. 

Tutto qui

Anna Marziano

2022 / France, Italy / 12 min

A film mulched from 16mm compositions, inspired by Charles Darwin’s final text on the evolutionary debt to the industrious earthworm, trained at micro-level: a poem of decay and regeneration.

COP26FILM

Luke Fowler

2023 / Scotland / 7 mins

Shot in the director’s home city of Glasgow during the 26th UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in 2021, the film prowls the periphery of official proceedings to disclose counter-narratives on display, including the presence of La Minga Indigena - a collective of  indigenous peoples from across the American continent staking their claim to representation.

End of the Season

Jason Evans

2020 / US / 13 min

A stark portrait of seasonal matsutake mushroom foragers - primarily immigrants of Southeast Asian descent - seeking to unearth the last treasures in an exceptionally dry year in South Central Oregon. A contemplation of nature, consumption, labor, displacement, and shelter.

SAVE THESE DATES for forthcoming screenings here at MMCP

Mar. 28
April 25

See you soon!

Curated by David Dinnell, Ellen Ito, Jay Kuehner

David Dinnell is a film programmer currently living in Seattle. He is the former Program Director of the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Media City Film Festival and the Tacoma Film Festival. He has curated film programs for the Flaherty Film Seminar, The Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento (Buenos Aires), UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art (NYC), Canyon Cinema 50, among others. He is co-founder and co-curator of Mur Murs, an ongoing Los Angeles-based series presenting artists and cinema.

Ellen Ito is an artist, programmer, and curator raised in the Lower Duwamish Valley. Current and upcoming projects include the exhibition Soft Power, on view at TAM through September 2024, the curation of Future Forward (Jan. 2024 at MMCP), and the documentary Following Gordon. Ellen is the Curator of Special Projects at the Tacoma Art Museum.

Jay Kuehner is an independent film critic, curator, and educator based in the Pacific Northwest whose

On Site is a moving image series rooted in senses of place, focusing on contemporary and historic artists’ cinema. The series draws from a diversity of works that commonly recruits cinematic form to attend enduring and ephemeral environments.

February 1, Doors 6:30 Screening at 7:00 PM

Free

At Sea
Peter Hutton
16mm, 2007 60 min

Peter Hutton drew on his years of experience as a merchant seaman to create this large-scale, compressed epic, voted the best avant-garde film of the preceding decade in a 2011 Film Comment poll. Shot in a series of steady, meticulously composed takes, At Sea follows a massive container ship from its construction in South Korea to its lifetime out on the water to its final dismantling in Bangladesh. Taken as a wordless critique of modern global capitalism, an elegiac reflection on the passing of time, or an exercise in pure sensory immersion, the film is an overwhelming experience, in keeping with its epigraph from Joseph Conrad: A man who is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea…. (NYFF, 2013)
Presented on 16mm

SAVE THESE DATES for forthcoming screenings here at MMCP
Feb. 29

March 28