Screening: aCinema Summer Screening Series—Saturday 7 PM *IN PERSON*

In person at Woodland Pattern

Join us for the second annual aCinema Summer Screening Series, featuring a weekend of six programs curated by Takahiro Suzuki and Janelle VanderKelen! We are thrilled to welcome them back to the gallery for this special, condensed presentation, which comprises aCinema’s Season 9.

The first two screenings will feature works selected from the aDifferent Program open call held this spring, which received over 225 submissions from around the globe. The weekend will then progress to four curated screenings including works by Miglė Križinauskaitė-Bernotienė, Eric Souther, Jennifer Sullivan, Sarah Turner, and many more!

Moonsets from the Horizon | Saturday @ 7 PM

Sarah Turner — But… You’re A Dolphin 

Synopsis: Can interspecies communication give us enlightenment to mysteries yet unseen? Dolphins have been known to be one of the most intelligent creatures on the planet. What do they know that we don't? In this short film, a dolphin tells Sarah a secret of the universe. Inspired by the research of John C. Lilly.

Bio: Sarah Turner is a new media and video artist who creates large-scale immersive environments and performances through analog media and creative coding. She engages in ritual and contemporary mythologies to augment reality through performative psycho spiritual activations. Turner is the Co-Founder of Mobile Projection Unit, which creates site-specific installations around the Pacific Northwest & New York through outdoor projection mapping. Her work has been shown at Portland Art Museum, Wieden + Kennedy, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s TBA Festival, Portland International Film Festival, Athens Digital Arts Festival, Northwest Film Center, Spaceness Festival, Marfa Open Festival, Laboratory Residency and more. Turner received an MFA at Alfred University in Electronic Integrated Art. She is the Audio/Video/Lighting Production Manager for Meow Wolf.

Eric Souther — Deep Time of Latent Space 

Synopsis: Deep Time of Latent Space relates the strata of human activity within large language models as another layer of the Anthropocene, which places AI into the realm of geological thinking that spirals into deep time and broadcasts into the future. The AI narrator takes us through the most incomprehensible moments of our history starting with the big bang, creation of earth, and the start of life. It uses its generalized knowledge to resolve our grasp of these moments into data-visualized images. It does so with confidence and a little bit of attitude, however, it tends to hallucinate. These hallucinations shine a light on what is needed to create a more ethical and accurate AI.

The Jefferson Project at Lake George uses specific and local data to understand the impact of human activity on fresh water, and how to mitigate those effects. A short interview with Dr. Jeremy Farrell shares how the Jefferson Project uses machine learning to create predictive models for understanding the patterns of past and reaching into the future to assist in preservation. A useful model for understanding the value of the local and self-generated databases.

Lake George was also chosen as a site of deep time and for its art historical significance. At the birth of geology in the nineteenth century the emerging science was in vogue. Many painters from the Hudson River School including John Frederick Kensett, Thomas Cole, and other painters painted portraits of rocks at the lake's shores. This point of time marks a transformative shift away from the biblical 6,000-year age of the earth to the conception of deep time that spans billions of years. Its implications allow for long-term thinking today. Another component to help guide the future of AI

Bio: Eric Souther (b.1987, Kansas City) holds an MFA in Electronic Integrated Arts from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, and an BFA in New Media from the Kansas City Art Institute.

His creative research draws from a multiplicity of disciplines, including new materialism, anthropology, ritual, deep time, and toolmaking. These areas are read through one another and coalesce in technological assemblages that form emergent systems or software for exploring relations. I instrumentalize these systems so that they can become performative ways to navigate unexpected images/meaning making. My work takes many pathways, which include interactive installation, audio-visual performance,single-channel video, and software.

His work has been featured nationally and internationally at venues such as the Museum of Art and Design, NYC, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY, and the Museum of Art, Zhangzhou, China. His work has screened in The Athens Digital Arts Festival, Athens, Greece, Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival, Beyoglu, Instanbul, Cronosfera Festival, Alessandria, Italy, the Galerija 12 New Media Hub, Belgrade, Serbia, the Simultan Festival, Timisoara, Romania, and the Festival ECRÃ of Audiovisual Experimentations, Rio de Janeiro. Souther is an Assistant Professor of Kinetic Imaging in the Gwen Frostic School of Art at Western Michigan University.

Laura Sofía Pérez — how to love a place so the children will love their land 

Synopsis: The voices of artist, poet, and archaelogist Estebán Valdés and Lares-born, self-identified indigenous countrywoman Pluma Bárbara carry us through the interior landscapes of Puerto Rico, sharing oral histories, ancestral knowledge, and thoughts about how we create consciousness around our cultural identity. The film brings to the forefront histories about women who are bearers of great knowledge, innovation, and creation, along with moments of darkness that visually represent our gaps in knowledge due to racially and politically motivated erasure.

Bio: Laura Sofía Pérez is an interdisciplinary artist who works in video, film, sound, and installation. She received her MFA in Film/Video from California Institute of the Arts. Her work draws from feminist and avant-garde cinema, phenomenological philosophy, Caribbean Postcolonial theory, and ancestral knowledge. She often works in collaborative settings of experimentation and improvisation with artists of varying disciplines and backgrounds to voice common perspectives on political, cultural, and social issues. Recent film festival selections include Doc Fortnight 2024: MoMa’s Festival of International Nonfiction Film and Media and Third Horizon Film Festival 2024. Recent artist residencies include The Studios at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2023), Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Banff, Canada (2020), the AfA Masterclass: Radical Care with Terike Haapoja (2020), and La Práctica at Beta-Local, San Juan, Puerto Rico (2019). She is Visiting Faculty in Film/Video at Bennington College, Bennington, VT.

Phillip Barker — I AM ALWAYS CONNECTED 

Synopsis: I Am Always Connected is about the inseparable connections between the mind and the body, lightness and darkness, and the camera and its subject. The film was made on a small country road near Nijmegen, in the Netherlands. I recently returned to the location and found that all the trees had been cut down.

Bio: Phillip Barker is a Canadian artist, filmmaker, and production designer, based in Toronto, Ontario. As a production designer, his work includes eleven feature films and two live operas with director Atom Egoyan. In 2006, Barker received a Directors Guild of Canada Award for Outstanding Achievement in Production Design for his work on Egoyan's Where the Truth Lies. Barker's production design has also been featured in films by directors such as Brian De Palma, Mira Nair, Lisa Cholodenko and Neil LaBute and Adam Bernstein.

Recently, a retrospective of his own work was presented at the Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival, the Festival du nouveau cinéma, Toronto International Film Festival, the Kaohsiung Film Festival (Taiwan), the Danish Film Institute and the Canadian Film Institute. The retrospective was accompanied by a 200-page book Strange Machines, The Films of Phillip Barker by writer and film maker Mike Hoolboom.

EarthWorm, a new short film written and directed by Barker, and co-created with Seungwoo Park, won the Canadian Grand Prix at the Regard Film Festival, and was selected as Canada's Top Ten by the Toronto International Film Festival, 2024.

Jard Lerebours — “Coconut” 

Synopsis: A short detailing my trip to my mother's homeland of Jamaica in order to bury Two Mommy, my grandmother and caretaker. “Coconut” is made from original super 8 footage filmed in Jamaica and found footage from the funeral home's coverage. “Coconut” is a public declaration of love for Gladys Austin.

Bio: Jard Lerebours is a community-oriented Jamaican-Haitian filmmaker. Jard is an active member of the Meerkat Media Artist Collective Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective and Millenium Film Workshop Collective. Jard’s practice straddles the worlds of cinema and video art. He approaches filmmaking as a conversation between friends and family guided by their loving West Indian upbringing in Long Island. 

As a curator, Jard’s first program Samkofa in collaboration with Film Diary NYC featured genre-defying and experimental work by Black filmmakers. Their next program, the land of wood and water, with cinemóvil nyc provided a much-needed space to showcase work by Jamaican filmmakers. Jard’s latest program, Samkofa 2, continues the important work of building community and collaboration among Black filmmakers operating outside traditional documentary and fiction.

Jard’s film work includes the Babylon Red Trilogy, which consists of the short films “Pandrog,” “Coconut,” and “Zion.” The trilogy explores gender, masculinity, Rastafarianism, Buddhism, and notions of home. His work has been showcased internationally by BAM, The Atlanta Film Festival, Indie Memphis Film Festival, NFFTY, Uppsala International Short Film Festival, Southern Fried Queer Pride, Out on Film, VAEFF and others.

Jard’s writing practice expands on his filmic work around Black culture, identity, and art. His work has been published by several media outlets, including Office Magazine, AFM, Fortunately Magazine, Forgotten Lands, and Crater Magazine.

Zohar Dvir — Butterfly Kiss

Synopsis: Carol panics and argues with her girlfriend, Ray, after an unexpected proposal. The situation gets worse when she wakes up in an apocalyptic reality and terribly discovers that Ray has transformed into a butterfly. Ray's transformation, the invasion of the outside world into their home, and the growing tension between the two threaten their relationship. Carol is afraid of losing Ray... but devoting yourself to your girlfriend could come at a price.

Bio: Zohar Dvir is an animation director based in Hamburg, Germany. She obtained her Bachelor's degree at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design and her MA at the Royal College of Art in London. Her distinctive animation style is self-taught, and blends 2D and 3D elements as well as a healthy dose of surrealism.

Jennifer Sullivan — One Week Walden

Synopsis: One-Week Walden takes the form of a video diary documenting my attempt to recreate a Walden-like retreat during a week-long stay in a pop-up camper parked in my father’s backyard in Upstate New York. As the implausibility of the endeavor becomes increasingly apparent and my ambitions grow more tempered, the piece unfolds into a layered narrative of unvarnished thoughts and feelings. Interwoven with journal-style reflections are improvised dramatizations and dance sequences drawn from fantasies of what I had hoped might occur. The video was partly inspired by Thoreau’s seeming lack of self-doubt—and perhaps by his impulse to cast his vision of stoic simplicity as an idealized, heroic endeavor. In contrast, One-Week Walden veers into satire, offering a messy, unresolved, and anticlimactic counterpoint—an exploration of failure, fantasy, and the unruly texture of lived experience.

Bio: Jennifer Sullivan (b. 1978, New York) creates expressionistic, character-driven paintings that explore personal narratives with a diaristic sensibility, mapping an ever-evolving inner life. Drawing on borrowed plotlines and protagonists from film, music, and other forms, as well as her own life experiences, her work weaves intimate feelings with shared cultural references. Over the years, her storytelling has taken various forms, from autobiographical performance and video art to her current focus on painting, drawing, monotype printmaking, and hand-painted t-shirts. Based in Ridgewood, Queens, Sullivan holds an MFA in Fine Art from Parsons School of Design and a BFA from Pratt Institute. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include The Tenderness (with Raychael Stine, Emma Gray HQ, 2024) and Sleeper (Turn Gallery, 2021). She has participated in group exhibitions at NADA Miami, Peter Blum Gallery, Marinaro, Klaus Von Nichtsaggend, and the deCordova Museum. Awards include fellowships with Paint School at Shandaken Projects (2020) and the Fine Arts Work Center (2012–13), as well as residencies at The Lighthouse Works, the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, the Ox-Bow School of Art, and Yaddo. Her work has been featured in The New York Times and the Brooklyn Rail.