09/15 @ 8:00pm - EMERGING ARTISTS COMMISSION: Meredith Drum and Rachel Stevens Present “Hurricane Season”

“Hurricane Season” is a one-night screening of experimental documentary shorts reflecting the recent history of the U.S. Gulf Coast— catastrophic storms, an oil spill, a pattern of government un-response and other evidence of a complex system out of balance. The screening is programmed by Meredith Drum and Rachel Stevens.

Still From Liza Johnson's South of Ten

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 asense 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 full list of work to be screened please visit http://hurricaneseason2010.wordpress.com .

ISSUE Project Room’s Emerging Artists Commission program is made possible, in part, through generous support from the Greenwall Foundation and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.