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

Create your own bandanna using kakishibu paper stencils and indigo dye

Come learn the process of using kakishibu (persimmon tannin paper) stencils and make your own unique cotton bandanna!

Bio:

Erika, the maker behind Kimagureya, is a Bremerton, WA based textile artist and hedge witch. She mainly works with katazomê, a type of Japanese dye method that involves the utilization of hand-cut stencils, rice paste resist, and mud and botanical dyes. Her work is inspired most by her bicultural roots, her ancestors, and the forest that surrounds her home.

Organized by Sanoe Stevenson-Egeland in partnership with Mini Mart City Park

Join us for a sculpture project using recycled takeout containers, packaging, and other kitchenware. Please feel free to bring your own small containers and plastic or silicone molds to make your own colorful “jellies”!

Workshop duration: 30–60 minutes

All ages welcome and no experience necessary. 

ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Philippe Hyojung Kim (b. 1989) grew up in a small town outside of Nashville, TN, and moved to the Pacific Northwest in 2013. He experiments with various materials and mediums, in response to his immediate surroundings to make objects and environments that exist in the space between painting and sculpture. His work often references queer identity, artificiality, and language.

 In his most recent body of work, titled (Un)Earthly Delights, Philippe collages plastic casts and remnants onto paper and acrylic in configurations that read at once as painting, text, and sculpture. He molds, casts, and reappropriates plastic to create playful, neon-saturated sculptures that allude to our cultural obsession with this most ubiquitous and climate-endangering material. In this process, he elevates this quotidian material, simultaneously giving it new life and highlighting the existential danger plastic poses.

 Philippe’s work has been exhibited nationally at galleries, museums, universities, and alternative art spaces across the US. 

Come fill up on poems @ Mini Mart City Park

Robert Mittenthal is author of Wax World (Chax, 2011), and chapbooks: Value Unmapped, Martyr Economy, Ready Terms, and Irrational Dude. He was a curator of the Subtext Reading Series in Seattle.
https://rmutts.blogspot.com/

Melanie Noel is the author of The Monarchs (Stockport Flats, 2013) and a Ringing
(Goodmorning Menagerie, 2020). She is preoccupied with bugs and animals and how they might write to each other across species and time.
https://www.oxeyed.net/

Nico Vassilakis is a visual and textual poet. His recent books include Voir Dire (Dusie Press 2020) and Letters of Intent (CyberWit 2022) along with other pamphlets and booklets. Nico is a contributing editor for Utsanga and has had his work exhibited globally. He lives in the middle of nowhere in Illinois with his wife and animals.
https://staringpoetics.wordpress.com/

How would you travel to distant worlds? Taking inspiration from the NASA X-HAB competition to design living environments for Mars exploration, we’ll construct new prototype vessels in this lo-tech, hands-on workshop for exploring any world! By deconstructing cardboard boxes and found papers, we’ll tie, tape, staple, fold, twist and bend materials to design a fleet of experimental modules that may one day transport us all to other worlds. Join us on this journey to save humanity (while also repurposing all those Amazon boxes you’ve been saving). Now it’s time to build the capsule if you dare...

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Marc Dombrosky (he/him) lives and works in Tacoma, WA. His multidisciplinary practice often involves the salvaging and reconstitution of everyday objects and documents into new forms and constellations, constructing fragmentary narratives. His work is represented by
Platform Gallery and will be included in Soft Power, opening October 2023 at Tacoma Art Museum.

Red May Seattle presents Michael Hardt and Alberto Toscano in conversation as part of a translocal Lecture Series on the Political Philosophy of Toni Negri. 

We want to celebrate the 90th birthday of one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th and 21st century with a translocal series of lectures.

From the early writings in the frame of Operaismo and Autonomia to the broadly discussed books written with Michael Hardt, the Italian philosopher Toni Negri has explored multiple fields of thought and forged crucial concepts with the aim to understand the reality in order to transform it toward communism. In so doing he has contributed to the project of rethinking revolution in the present. The lecture series is meant as a collective embrace to Toni Negri and his living thought, affirming, showing and preserving the situated importance of his work for an uncertain future.

https://scholars.duke.edu/person/hardt

https://www.sfu.ca/communication/people/faculty/Alberto-Toscano.html

http://www.euronomade.info/?p=15501

https://www.redmayseattle.org/

https://www.redmayseattle.org/red-may-tv