Rachel Blogs!

OK, OK... I have been here for how long? And I have never done a blog. I admit to not being very good at them. Though I do OK at Facebook, so look me up if you really want in on my personal details. It is thrilling stuff.

Sundance 2009 was great. This was my 8th year, I think. I have been quite a few times... I actually won a trip in 1997 while I was in college. To be honest, I kinda cheated by stealing all the entry forms and having parties for people to help me fill them out. But it worked, so no guilt. Then I volunteered several years. I was lucky to go with Austin Film Society and Austin Studios for marketing as well. But I think I enjoyed going with Aurora the most because it was not only about spreading the love of Aurora, but also about seeking out ideas for programs. I think that the short films and the documentaries are what make film festivals special, especially when you are in a big festival where narratives will likely be picked up and distributed.

For me, the documentary shorts were the most memorable. But it was also our first screening, with all the Aurora ladies together (Mary Magsamen, our new Curator, and Sorcha, our esteemed board member) AND it was at the Egyptian... which is really the iconic venue located on the Main Street.

My next favorite was THE YES MEN FIX THE WORLD, which will likely get exhibition nationally as it was so entertaining. Go see it. Join the Yes Men website too.

There were other films, though I walked away not seeing as many as I would like. I look forward to either bringing them in through Aurora or other organizations in Houston.

Outside of films, I loved the Austin Film Society party where I got to see familiar faces and celebrate some Texas films. We hope to bring some of them to Aurora.

I did notice that I am older and can not see as many films as I did in 1997 where I would totally wear myself out, but I enjoyed myself.

A special thank you to Winsie Tow and the Sundance Filmmaker Lodge for allowing us to come and spread the Aurora word. We even met people from Houston there! Wild.

Anyhow, I still have lots of laundry to do and all kinds of catching up, but I definitely think film lovers should experience Sundance or any other major film festival in their lifetime. Inspiring and fun!

All the best from a tired Aurora Fan,

Rachel

Aurora at Sundance Film Festival

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Originally uploaded by Aurora Picture Show

Fundance with Aurora at the Filmmaker's Lodge

Here we are at the Filmmaker's Lodge telling everyone how great Aurora is and giving away stuff.

Fundance with Aurora day 2

Rachel and Sorcha at the New Frontier area playing with an interactive piece about feelings.

Mary and Rachel in front of the Egyptian theater.

Fundance with Aurora

We arrived at Sundance!  Here is Rachel and Sorcha on the bus going to a theater!

MOCK UP ON MU

So this is the new film by Aurora Advisory Board member Craig Baldwin! He is the godfather of microcinema one could say. In a radical hybrid of spy, sci-fi, Western, and even horror genres, Craig Baldwin's Mock Up On Mu cobbles together a feature-length "collage-narrative" based on (mostly) true stories of California's post-War sub-cultures of rocket pioneers, alternative religions, and Beat lifestyles. Pulp-serial snippets, industrial-film imagery, and B- (and Z-) fiction clips are intercut with newly shot live-action material, powering a playful, allegorical trajectory through the now-mythic occult matrix of Jack Parsons (Crowleyite founder of the Jet Propulsion Lab), L.Ron Hubbard (sci-fi author turned cult-leader), and Marjorie Cameron (bohemian artist and "mother of the New Age movement"). Their intertwined tales spin out into a speculative farce on the militarization of space, and the corporate take-over of spiritual fulfillment and leisure-time. Definitely a must see!!!

NY THEATRICAL PREMIERE RUN!
Craig Baldwin’s
MOCK UP ON MU
January 14 – 20
ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES
32 SECOND AVENUE NEW YORK, NY 10003; (212) 505-5181 fax (212) 477-2714

Alex Rivera's Web Project

Visiting filmmaker Alex Rivera shared with Aurora all sorts of video work, shorts and awesome films; nevertheless, his take on the immigration issue does not end there. He is also working with Angel Nevarezon on a web project called Low Drone which consists of a remote controlled low-rider spy drone that jumps in between the US and Mexico in order to increase the level of satire surveying the US border patrol.

Aurora visiting artist, Ximena Cuevas

The Yes Men in the "special edition" of today's New York Times.

If you had the chance to see The Yes Men in 2005 at Aurora, you might be interested in what they came out with:

In an elaborate operation six months in the planning, 1.2 million papers were printed at six different presses and driven to prearranged pickup locations, where thousands of volunteers stood ready to pass them out on the street. Early this morning, commuters nationwide were delighted to find out that while they were sleeping, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had
come to an end...

Toypunks Rocks the House

Aurora Picture Show hosted filmmakers Chris Nelson and Carl Wormley (pictured) this weekend with a screening of their recently completed documentary Toypunks featuring designer toy creators Bounty Hunter and Frank Kozik. Nelson and Wormley filled audience members in on the highlights of shooting in the Harajuku shopping district of Tokyo and plans for a next installment of the documentary series. To hear Chris Nelson's interview about Toypunks on KUHF-FM (Houston's NPR affiliate), download the interview from the station's website here.

Extremely Shorts Rock the House

Aurora closed our the first half of our calendar year with a packed house for Extremely Shorts Eleven. The weekend kicked off with four hundred plus attending a "Best of" Extremely Shorts screening at
Discovery Green Park(photo provided by Arie Moghadden-thank you Arie), followed by three screenings at the Aurora home venue of new shorts from emerging film and video artists hosted by curator Ed Halter. This years top three films were David Purdie's "Astrowhirled", Sarah Grass' "I'd Rather Have a Puppy" and Brandon Van Meter's "Who I'll Be." After several hours of karaoke the final night of the festival, Aurora is ready for some much deserved R&R. Please join us again in August for Houston filmmaker Chris Nelson's screening of Toypunks. Get ready for toys, fashion, and punk rock!

Weiss Talks

Bart Weiss, founder of the Dallas Video Festival, hosted two screenings of the "Best of Fest" from the past twenty years of his festival at Aurora Picture Show this weekend. He also kicked off Aurora's debut salon series with a short talk entitled "What is Video Art?" at Aurora's video library on Sunday. Weiss walked visitors through the main periods of video art history and some of the more defined genres such as performance-based video art, showing samples of works from William Wegman and
Ant Farm, both of which are available to view for free at Aurora's video library, 1524 Sul Ross.

Harrell Fletcher is a Member, Are You?

Join or renew your Aurora Picture Show membership now and be entered to win a limited edition Harrell Fletcher print made exclusively for Aurora Picture Show. All new or renewed memberships, purchased between now and June 30, 2008, will be entered for one chance to win this special artwork.

A participant in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, Fletcher´s work has been shown at SF MoMA, the de Young Museum, The Berkeley Art Museum, and Yerba Buena Center For The Arts in the San Francisco Bay Area, The Drawing Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Sculpture Center, Domain de Kerguehennec in France, and The Royal College of Art in London. In 2002, Fletcher started Learning To Love You More, an ongoing participatory web site with Miranda July. Visit the
Harrell Fletcher site for more about his work.

Join now for a chance to win this exclusive work by clicking
here to become a member.

Aurora Does it Again

Aurora Picture Show rounded out another successful annual multimedia festival last Saturday, with the final performances of Media Archelogy: Live and Televised. This year's performers included Negativland, who performed at Rice University; Brent Green, who performed with musicians Howe Gelb (of the popular band Giant Sand), Jeremy Gara (of the band Arcade Fire) and Thoger Lund at the Orange Show and artists Tara Mateik, and Shana Moulton, who performed at DiverseWorks. Photos featured include shots from Tara Mateik's "Putting the Balls Away" and Moulton's "Cynthia's Moment." The artist-heavy week drew great audiences and closed with an extravagant brunch hosted by Hotel Icon's new restaurant Voice. Our thanks goes out to all the Media Archeology artists, sponsors, volunteers and Aurora staff who helped make this a festival like no other.

Aurora Adds New Faces to Advisory Board

Aurora Picture Show has added some familiar Aurora friends to the official Aurora family. Curators Bree Edwards and Astria Suparak have graciously agreed to join the Aurora Advisory Board. Welcome Bree and Astria!

Bree Edwards is an independent curator and cultural producer who has held the positions of Program Manager at the Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston and Curator of Public Programs at the Asheville Museum of Art. In Asheville she organized a year-long, interdisciplinary series focused on the legacy of the experimental college Black Mountain College (1933-57). She has organized numerous group exhibitions and screenings and her writing has been published by The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Museu do Chiado in Lisbon, as well as appearing in various blogs and art publications.

Astria Suparak is the Director of Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. From 1998-2000 she directed the weekly Pratt Institute Film Series in Brooklyn, which included live music, performance and installations. In 2006 she became the inaugural director of the contemporary art space The Warehouse Gallery at Syracuse University, organizing acclaimed and sometimes controversial exhibitions including Faux Naturel, COME ON: Desire Under the Female Gaze, and Networked Nature with Rhizome. Her conceptually and aesthetically diverse shows have exhibited and screened at sites including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Kitchen, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Yale University School of Architecture, The Liverpool Biennial, P.S.1, Anthology Film Archives, International Film Festival Oberhausen, Eyebeam and Participant, Inc. Gallery.

Grover Cleans Up

Aurora's fearless Artistic Director Andrea Grover cleaned up this past weekend at the DiverseWorks Gala. Grover was one of three "visionary" honorees for the evening which included Project Row Houses' Rick Lowe and Fotofest founders Wendy Watriss and Fred Baldwin. Other honorees included artists Mel Chin , William Steen, and Sharon Engelstein and patrons Cindy Bishop and David Donnelly (Cindy is also an Aurora Board member!), Charles Mary Kubricht, Ron Sommers and Jeff and Toni Beauchamp. Congratulations Andrea! (Photo features Andrea Grover and Delicia Harvey).

You Are Here Symposium: Instant Replay

If you missed the December symposium You Are Here, you can watch video documentation online (courtesy of Bree Edwards and Johnny DeKam).

You Are Here- Nato Thompson

You Are Here- Matt Coolidge/CLUI

You Are Here- Institute for Applied Autonomy

You Are Here- Matt McCormick 1

You Are Here- Matt McCormick 2

Mapping/Tactical Media Brain Trust

This weekend's excellent symposium YOU ARE HERE, curated by Bree Edwards and co-presented by Aurora Picture Show and the Mitchell Center for the Arts, is immortalized via live blogging on Matt McCormick's Action Items.

The symposium featured artists and curators working with mapping and tactical media, including Matt McCormick (who performed his live score to his film Future So Bright), and talks by Nato Thompson (Creative Time), Rich Pell (Institute for Applied Autonomy), and Matthew Coolidge (Center for Land Use Interpretation). Coolidge has begun a longer term project in Houston, investigating the ripe-for-the-picking Gulf Coast. This weekend the CLUI field office (a mobile trailer) arrived and was plunked down on the edge of Buffalo Bayou. So begins our journey...

Big thanks to curator (I mean cultural context provider) Bree Edwards, and Karen Farber and Nancy Zastudil of the fabulous Mitchell Center for the Arts at UH for making this event happen.

Pictured: ISee (created by Institute for Applied Autonomy) a web-based application charting the locations of closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance cameras in urban environments.

Aurora Picture Show and the Menil Collection enjoyed a night in the park last Saturday. In association with the Menil Collection's exhibition A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s, Aurora presented works by some of the artists working during the time of Nauman's early experiments in film and video. Artists featured included John Baldessari, Vito Acconci, William Wegman and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. We'd like to thank Steve Seid from Pacific Film Archive for helping us pull together this screening and the Menil Collection for the opportunity. Also, if you missed this wonderful evening of early conceptual video in the outdoors, please join us Saturday, January 12, 2008 for another screening in the park -- this time featuring works from contemporary artists forging new paths in film and video. Save the date!

Aurora Advisory Board Member at MOMA

Aurora Picture Show's Advisory Board Member Kevin Everson has a series of screenings coming up in New York. Short films by Everson will be screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York tonight, Monday October 22, at 7:00 p.m. and Thursday, October 25 at 6:30 p.m. The screenings will be in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2, T2 at the Museum of Modern Art located at 11 West 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues.

Congratulations Kevin!