From: Antonella Bonfanti (email suppressed)
Date: Sun Apr 06 2008 - 19:39:05 PDT
Greetings Frameworkers,
For those of you in the Rochester neighborhood (meaning anyone within
the one and a half hour driving distance) we would be thrilled if you
could come and join us for an evening with Michael Robinson on Monday,
April 14th at the Dryden Theatre. The details are below.
Hope you can make it out,
Doug, Jason and Antonella
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Pop Landscapes: Michael Robinson in person
Monday, April 14th
8pm | The Dryden Theatre
$5
Mining the depths of popular culture has become the zeitgeist within
media arts these days, the de facto creative means for an army of
young talent. From the late-70s work of Dara Birnbaum to the
contemporary circuit-bending of Cory Archangel and the video
collective Paper Rad, our culture is repeatedly vivisected and
reinterpreted. Pop will eat itself, to be sure, but postmodernism is
surely a ruminant beast, continually regurgitating and digesting
itself. After over 30 years of analysis, one would expect very little
left to be said about these modern times, and then along comes an
artist like Michael Robinson.
The film and video work of Michael Robinson consists of equal parts
landscape cinematography and pop culture mashup, and it is through the
interaction between these two seemingly disparate modes of filmmaking
that his work becomes transcendent. Milking out every drop of
saccharine bliss from pop songs, Michael sweetens the normally
doom-ridden theme of humanity's failure to achieve heaven on Earth in
Victory Over the Sun (2007). And We All Shine On (2006) is interested
in the harmonies and discordances brought out by positioning and
repositioning the natural world around the virtual, while you don't
bring me flowers (2005) investigates our fascination with pictorial
tourism through a slideshow of National Geographic two-page landscape
spreads. 2007's Light is Waiting uses a heavily manipulated, very
special episode of Full House as fodder to launch in to an examination
of our media's colonialist tendencies toward the exotic Other. DM.
Other films to be screened include The General Returns From One Place
to Another (2006), Tidal (2002), Chiquita and the Soft Escape (2003),
and his most recent video, All Through the Night (2008)
To find out more about Robinson go to www.poisonberries.net
Hosted by Doug McLaren, Jason Middleton and Antonella Bonfanti
Co-sponsored by University of Rochester Department of English and the
Film and Media Studies Program
Special Thanks to Jim Healy, Michael Neault and www.croquetshows.com
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For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.