[Frameworks] Screening: Hurricane Season Tonight in Brooklyn

[Meredith Drum]

Hello Frameworks,

Please join us tonight (9/15) for a screening of short experimental  
documentaries reflecting the recent history of the U.S. Gulf region.  
The line up includes work by Pawel Wojtasik, Liza Johnson, Ghen  
Dennis, Gretchen Skogerson, Tony Oursler, Robert Flaherty, Christina  
McPhee, Helen Hill and Courtney Egan. The event takes place at ISSUE  
Project Room at 8 PM, on the 3rd Floor of the Old American Can  
Factory, 232 3rd Street in Brooklyn. Admission is free. Press release  
below for more information.

Best,
Meredith Drum

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On September 15, 2010 at 8 p.m. at ISSUE Project Room guest curators  
Meredith Drum and Rachel Stevens will present “Hurricane Season,” a  
one-night screening of experimental documentary shorts reflecting the  
recent history of the Gulf Coast of the U.S. —-- catastrophic storms,  
an oil spill, a pattern of government un-response and other evidence  
of a complex system out of balance. ISSUE Project Room is located on  
the 3rd floor of (OA) Can Factory, 232 3rd Street at 3rd Avenue in the  
Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. Subway F and G Line to Carroll St- 
Smith St. stop. Telephone: 718-330-0313. Website:  
issueprojectroom.org. Admission is FREE.

Produced primarily in the Gulf region, the work included in “Hurricane  
Season” responds to complex issues with experimental strategies in an  
attempt to represent the landscape, people, the system, industry and  
their interrelationships. Representing a range of styles that are more  
lyrical and differently mediated than images seen in popular culture  
immediately following each disaster, the line-up features work  
produced since 2005, including some very recent work that is still in  
progress. Liza Johnson's South of Ten considers how Mississippian  
survivors of Katrina are framed, with gesture and performance as  
alternatives to conventional interview-based forms of bearing witness.  
Pawel Wojtasik’s immersive video Below Sea Level (courtesy Priska C.  
Juschka Fine Art), partly shot with a 360° panoramic camera in and  
around New Orleans, articulates a sense of impermanence inherent in  
the location, underscored by Steven Vitiello’s soundscape. A  
collaborative film/video by Courtney Egan and Helen Hill takes a more  
personal and fleeting look at one block, blending flood-damaged film  
found after Katrina with video shot of the same site. Work currently  
in progress examining the BP oil spill will include pieces by Ghen  
Dennis and Christina McPhee.

Framing the contemporary work will be excerpts from Robert Flaherty's  
Louisiana Story from 1948 (courtesy Flaherty Film Seminar) and Tony  
Oursler's Son of Oil from 1982. Louisiana Story, a lushly shot  
docudrama in black and white commissioned by Standard Oil, features an  
idyllic Bayou setting and an innocent boy’s adventures there as  
changes come to the region through the construction of an oil rig. The  
landscape and lifestyle of the Cajun people appear undisturbed by the  
drilling process, and even improved by the arrival of the oil  
industry. Tony Oursler’s colorful diatribe against the oil industry  
and our culture’s oil addiction is playfully enacted by performers and  
paper sets.

Although the program is regionally focused, the intricately  
intertwined economic, environmental, social, public and private issues  
suggested by the films and videos speak to a larger context as we  
collectively grapple with a gross consumption of fossil fuels, global  
warming, environmental erosion, newly diminished ways of life and  
unstable economies—and how to represent these things.

For a complete list of works, please visit:
http://hurricaneseason2010.wordpress.com/about/

Media Contact:
Meredith Drum meredithdrum at gmail.com or
Rachel Stevens racheljstevens at gmail.com

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