Wednesday April 14, 2010, 8:00 pm

At the Silent Movie Theatre, 611 N Fairfax

Los Angeles Filmforum, Newtown and Cinefamily present

Blast Phemy 3: A Midweek Music/Media Mashup

Featuring Three Incredible Musical and Media Performances for your Listening and Viewing Pleasure!

... Rick Bahto, multi-projector 8mm & Luciano Chessa, composer/performer

... Eve Beglarian, composer & Anne Bray, video & harpist, Susie Allen

... Jim Ovelmen, animation and banjo

**NOTE THE CHANGE IN PRICE, TIME AND LOCATION**

Our third show in the ongoing Blast Phemy! series features outstanding musical soloists performing new, cutting-edge works seamlessly melded with a spectrum of media styles, including video montage, 3D animation and multi-projector 8mm film!

We've got a collaboration between 8mm gunslinger Rick Bahto (who has exhibited at venues like MoMA, the San Francisco Cinematheque and Director's Lounge in Berlin) and composer/performer Luciano Chessa (who's an expert at both the Vietnamese dan bau and the musical saw.)

Another of the evening's collaborations is a meeting of the minds between video artist Anne Bray and postminimalist composer Eve Beglarian, with a live performance by harpist Susie Allen:

1. “Play Nice, the musical composition, was written for harpist Elizabeth Panzer in 1997 by Eve Beglarian but it has also be played by one (or two) people on toy piano, midi keyboard, and cimbalom.  The video's structure of forward and reversal parallels the music's even though the video is running at 10 percent of normal speed with additional undulation effects. The original scene involved two shepherds on cell phones in western Ireland coordinating traffic and the transfer of a herd of sheep from one field to another.”
   

And finally, we also have a live collision between animation and banjo(!), delivered by psychedelic specialist Jim Ovelmen:

1. “Queens of Sorrow overall, is a meditation on the paradoxically opulent and dreary interiors of a Gilded Age mansion of Astor/Vanderbilt proportions. The animation shows a kind of interplay of the inscrutable self-isolation and mindless frolicking and eroticism of characters trapped inside the mansion. A foil to this merry indulgence is a solemn character whose creation was inspired by the late country-folk singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt. He takes a seated place in the mansion, strumming his guitar in the window-place while his partner takes skyward shots at a hidden target from his Winchester rifle.  Drawings are cast in a time and motion-based form, there is motive of hijacking identity and knowledge and storing into, and questioning, fiction. For me, it is the heartbreaking knowledge of loss and competition with material presence, exploiting the aesthetic-language excess and exuberance of the “Gilded Age” period to reflect upon our own time. Upon the nature of theatrically, the sublime, and spiritual idea of being completely freed from material and responsibility, I am using the form of time, narrative and animation to communicate these ideas.”
   

Tickets $13 general; $9 for Cinefamily, Filmforum, and NewTown members.  Advance purchase recommended, available at BrownPaperTickets.com.  Click here to purchase!

About the Artists:

Luciano Chessa: As a composer, pianist, and musical saw / Vietnamese dan bau soloist, Luciano Chessa has been active in Europe, the U.S., and Australia.  Recent premieres include a large orchestral work commissioned by the Orchestra Filarmonica di Torino, Italy and titled Ragazzi incoscienti scarabocchiano sulla porta di un negozio fallito an.1902, and Movements, a multimedia work for 16mm film, dan bau and amplified film projectors produced in collaboration with filmmaker Rick Bahto. Chessa is currently working on the completion and staging of an oratorio titled Urlo impietrato, a scene of which has already been premiered in 2008 by Nicole Paiement and the Ensemble Parallele.

Rick Bahto is an artist working with Super and standard 8mm film currently living in Los Angeles. His works have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Cinematheque, Chicago Filmmakers, Wolfart Projectspaces (Rotterdam), Director's Lounge (Berlin), Maria Pandora (Madrid) and at festivals including The 8 Fest (Toronto), Small Windows 8mm Film Festival (San Francisco), the Seoul Festival of Super 8 Experimental Film and the Experimental Film Today Conference (Preston, UK). He recently curated a program of films entitled Luminous Triptych, which he presented in San Francisco (at Artists' Television Access), Los Angeles (at Echo Park Film Center) and Phoenix (at Deus Ex Machina Gallery, with No Festival Required). This year he will be teaching several Super 8 filmmaking, hand-processing and in-camera editing workshops at the Echo Park Film Center.

Eve Beglarian: Composer and Performer Eve Beglarian, according to the Los Angeles Times, “is a humane, idealistic rebel and a musical sensualist.” Beglarian's music has been commissioned and performed by the Los Angeles Master Chorale, the American Composers Orchestra, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the California EAR Unit, and the Paul Dresher Ensemble. She has also worked extensively in theater, with directors Lee Breuer (Mabou Mines) and Chen Shi Zheng; in dance, with Ann Carlson, Victoria Marks, Susan Marshall, and David Neumann, and with visual and video artists Cory Arcangel, Anne Bray, Barbara Hammer, and Shirin Neshat.  Recordings of Eve's music are available on Koch, New World, Cantaloupe, Accurate Distortion, Atavistic, Innova, Kill Rock Stars, and Naxos.

Anne Bray has been working at the intersection of public art and media art since the mid '70s as an artist, teacher and administrator. Video projection is her usual medium. As an artist and curator she exhibits temporary installations combining personal and social positions via video, audio, flat and 3-d screens at museums, galleries, gas stations, malls, movie theaters, on TV, in department stores, on billboards. She has produced public art projects funded by Public Art Fund, NY Avant Garde Festival, LACE, among others, and mixed media installations at Santa Monica Museum of Art, Banff Centre and Art & Eco Triennial in Maribor Slovenia. In 2010 she is showing her videos at Stanford Lively Arts, Newtown at Cinefamily, Pasadena Art Alliance and next year at the Getty Villa and Montalvo Arts Center, each in collaboration with postmininalist composer Eve Beglarian. This year she is also showing artists' videos at LACMA Late Night, Occidental College, GLOW art festival in Santa Monica and permanently installing video art at LAX airport on 80+ screens. As a lecturer, she teaches graduate seminars in the new genre arts at Claremont Graduate University plus public art and multimedia at University of Southern California.

Susan Allen is widely known for her premiere performances of new music for harp throughout the U.S., Canada, South America, Australia and Europe.  She has appeared on the NBC Today Show, National Public Radio with the Vermeer String Quartet, New York Philharmonic's Horizons Series, Carnegie, Weill, Alice Tully, Merkin and Symphony Space halls in New York, the Kitchen, the Smithsonian Institute, Gaudeamus Contemporary Music Week in the Netherlands, the Ferienkurse fur Neue Musik in Darmstadt, Germany and the Festival de Caracas, Venezuela.  With jazz great Yusef Lateef she performed at the Los Angeles Festival, the Verona Jazz Festival in Italy, the World Music Institute's Concert Series in New York, the Jazz Bakery, and the Jazz and Blues All-Star Festival in Stockholm, Sweden. Susan performs on the concert harp, the electric harp and the Kayagum (Korean zither).

Jim Ovelmen is a visual artist living in Los Angeles. While often mixing drawing, painting, sculpture and animation, he creates multi-media work. Themes in his work often present humanitarian and idiosyncratic messages relevant to our societal insecurities and pathologies . His work has been exhibited at galleries and museums nationally and internationally, including Torrance Museum of Art, L.A.C.E., Cirrus Gallery, Hayworth Gallery, Kristi Engle Gallery, and Christine Koenig in Vienna. He is also Assistant Professor of Art at California State University Los Angeles.

This screening series is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles.

Additional support is generously provided by the American Cinematheque.