McEvoy Foundation for the Arts proudly announces three distinctive Spring public programs that explore modern and contemporary perspectives on the self and representation. From February through April, 2022, visit McEvoy Arts to see the exhibition Image Gardeners and experience these related events that include a film screening, panel, and live performance about and by a diverse group of guest artists, curators, and scholars. The programs address topics as varied as the direct intimacy of analog film to the whimsical potential of inter-galactic performance. Tickets go on sale in January 2022.
The series kicks off on Saturday, February 5 with LIVING IN MIRRORS: the life that belongs to me, a program of short films from 1966 to 2019 that explore the diversity of women’s voices in film in 16mm and digital formats. On Saturday, March 5, Person. Woman. Camera. TV. is a conversation on the body and the camera with pioneering media artist Lynn Hershman Leeson and feminist scholar Peggy Phelan. Andon Saturday, April 30, McEvoy Arts presents the premiere of Genevieve Quick’s Hello World, a radical sci-fi fantasy of Otherness told via a live performance and video game.
Spring 2022 programs are presented in conjunction with Image Gardeners (January 14 – April 30, 2022), the McEvoy Arts exhibition thatjoins a broad selection of photography by women and non-binary artists from the McEvoy Family Collection with new commissions by three local artists to probe a spectrum of aesthetics and personal expression through portraiture. In the Screening Room, Gina Basso guest curates seen only, heard only through someone else’s description, a related program of experimental films that explore how images and narratives construct meaning, artifice, and memory.
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McEvoy Arts Public Programs
February – April 2022
Film Screening
LIVING IN MIRRORS: the life that belongs to me
Saturday, February 5, 2022 • 6pm | McEvoy Foundation for the Arts
$10 General Admission • $7 Seniors (65+) and Students with ID
This program features short films in 16mm and digital formats by women artists who turn the cameras on themselves and others to activate interior worlds. Illustrating the endless possibilities of film and the moving image, the selected filmmakers envision the screen as fertile ground for examination and construction of the self and collective selves. LIVING IN MIRRORS is guest curated by filmmaker and curator Gina Basso and San Francisco Cinematheque director Steve Polta. Films by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Julie Dash, Anne Charlotte Robertson, and Stephanie Barber, among others, are presented.
LIVING IN MIRRORS is co-presented with San Francisco Cinematheque.
Conversation
Person. Woman. Camera. TV.
Saturday, March 5, 2022 • 3pm | McEvoy Foundation for the Arts
Free with registration
Lynn Hershman Leeson’s arresting photograph Seduction (1986) is the jumping off point for an illustrated discussion on technology and the female body led by curator Corey Keller. Hershman Leeson, whose pioneering work has long investigated the impact of technology on society and the self, is joined on the panel by Peggy Phelan, a renowned feminist scholar whose work in the field of performance studies is foundational.
Performance
Hello World
Saturday, April 30, 2022 • 6pm | McEvoy Foundation for the Arts
$15 General Admission • $12 Seniors (65+) and Students with ID
Genevieve Quick’s Hello World is about CETI (Celadonian Extraterrestrial Intelligence), a research consortium that facilitates communication between Planet Celadon and Earth. As the narrative unfolds in a live performance and video game, the cast of self-identified Asian American women encounter a black hole, the multiverse, and communication outages that they attempt to remedy. Hello World offers a two-way channel between earth and the multiverse, a bridge across time, and a metaphor for the Asian diaspora.
For registration and ticket information, visit www.mcevoyarts.org/events. All events are presented in accordance with current health guidelines.
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Participant Biographies
Gina Basso is a San Francisco-based independent film programmer and visual artist. She has organized programs for San Francisco movie houses including The Roxie Theater, The Castro Theater, and Alamo Drafthouse. She has curated programs for Design Within Reach, San Francisco, CA; Hunter’s Point Shipyard, San Francisco, CA; and the Northwest Film Forum, Seattle, WA and is the former film curator for San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In her creative practice, she uses video to explore transitional or altered states of being. Her video work has been presented by San Francisco Cinematheque’s Crossroads Festival; Artist Television Access, San Francisco; the Roxie Theater; HAXAN Film Festival; Antimatter Experimental Film Festival Vancouver, BC; and online via publicrecords.nyc.
Lynn Hershman Leeson is an American artist and filmmaker whose work transgresses art, social commentary, technology, and media. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums internationally, including the New Museum, New York; The Tate Modern, London; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. Her films have been exhibited at the Berlin Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, and Toronto International Film Festival, among others. Her work is held in collections including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, Prix ars Electronica, and Siggraph Lifetime Achievement Award. She lives and works in San Francisco and New York.
Corey Keller is a historian of photography and independent curator based in Oakland. From 2003 to 2021, she served as curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) where her exhibitions included monographic surveys on Dawoud Bey, John Beasley Greene, and Francesca Woodman as well as the thematic exhibits About Time: Photography in a Moment of Change and Brought to Light: Photography and Invisibility, 1840-1900. Recent writings include essays on Eliza Withington, Susan Meiselas, and Clare Strand. She has lectured and taught widely, and is currently adjunct professor in the photography program at California College of the Arts (CCA).
Peggy Phelan is the Ann O’Day Maples Chair in the Arts and Professor of Theater & Performance Studies and English at Stanford University. Her widely influential work covers an extensive range of subjects including feminism, photography, dance, film, music, and poetry. She most recently edited, contributed to, and co-curated with Richard Meyer Contact Warhol: Photography Without End (MIT Press and Cantor Art Center, 2018). Phelan has been President of Performance Studies International, a fellow of the Getty Research Institute, and a Guggenheim Fellow.
Steve Polta is the director of San Francisco Cinematheque. He is a co-founder and current curator of Cinematheque’s CROSSROADS film festival, presented annually since 2010. He holds an MFA in Filmmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute and a Masters of Library and Information Science (MLIS) from San José State University. He is co-editor, with Brett Kashmere, of Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live! documenting the film and curatorial work of the Bay Area artist to be co-published by Cinematheque and INCITE Journal of Experimental Media in 2022. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Genevieve Quick is a San Francisco-based interdisciplinary artist and critic whose work explores global identity and politics in speculative narratives, technology, and media-based practices. She has exhibited at institutions including the Wattis Institute, San Francisco; Asian Cultural Center, Gwangju, South Korea; and Asian Art Museum, San Francisco. Quick has been awarded visual arts residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, Recology, and the de Young Museum, among others. She has contributed essays and reviews to publications including 48 Hills, Artforum, cmagazine, and Art Practical.