Garden Reflexxx presents: 4
7 May 2021, Pink Flamingo Cinema
Woven In Time
Evelyn Roth
9 minutes, 1974
Resourceful cinema is the practice of re/using materials that are easily available, formally, stylistically, with the intention of making movies. Nobody embodies the effort than North American artist Evelyn Roth who sews nylon, moulds betacam tape, and weaves wearable garments so vibrant their physicality puts ‘move’ into ‘movies’.
Photographed and cut by Tony Westman, Woven In Time displays her creations – their splendour as animated splotches – danced by a group of freeballers. Each movement of each dancer is wound up in art-clothes, stuck in her synthetic web. Is the uncredited director of this film the person in charge of the dancers? Is this Roth’s world, or how we see it as adoring fans? Did Woven inspire Amrita Hepi? Evelyn is a lively Art Attack, but nobody’s fighting.
By André Shannon
Follow up with Amrita Hepi, P.O.W.A (2017), Dan Deacon’s Meme Generator x GIANNI ONASSIS (2015)
Forced Into Images
Destiny Deacon, Virginia Fraser
9 minutes, 2001
Two kids sit in front of a camera, against a sheet backdrop, giggling, wearing masks, acting. Is it an audition?
The film Forced Into Images shines, through shadowed lighting, her vision of humanity. This isn’t some artificial, FX, future nostalgia marketed to arty alt-house teenagers that like True Blood. Like her other works of art, Forced... isn’t wallpaper, or some Ryan Murphy intro montage, but a deeply felt Australian horror story.
An artist from the Kuku and Erub/Mer people of Far North Queensland and Torres Strait, born in the 50s, Destiny Deacon’s movies/materials/living rooms/sets/installs are either more than (or just perfectly) the practice of expressing what’s described as ‘not-art’. Liberation from the confines of value is the foundation of resourceful filmmaking. Forced… is about love up close and personal.
By André Shannon
Follow up with Travis (2004), Nan Goldin (artist), Babette Mangolte (artist)
Wardrobe
LOVEDAVID
1.5 minutes, 2018
LOVEDAVID’s is-it-hand-drawn-or-an-Apple-pencil cartoon shows someone (with a bulge, admit you looked) opening a closet, getting dressed, and almost finishing an outfit.
Animation drags said them through shadows and layers. We see pixels, formations, and then de-forming. The image struggles, exhausted (maybe from laziness cause rotoscoping is time consuming).
Like Microsoft fonts automatically switching to Times, Wardrobe is a formal switch. Someone fixed ‘closet’ by removing its weight, code, attitude, settling for a cockier word. But the person dressing in Wardrobe probably wouldn’t say that. Who even says ‘wardrobe’? The person using ‘wardrobe’ as a word… Who is that? The changing-self is accompanied, or maybe welcomed, by clothes...
By André Shannon
Follow up with Andreas Nilsson, Keanu Hoi, and Ride or Die music video by Art Camp, Danae Gosset & Danica (2021)
Number Ones
Stelly G and Kiki Oner
9 minutes, 2021
4 is full of corny love letters to self, to Country, to community. Number Ones perceives all-the-time-friends, sometimes enemies, Stelly G and Kiki Oner, battling in the first sneaker category in Eora at March’s West Ball.
Inspired by Akerman’s One Day Pina Asked…, the film collects shots and edited impressions of the day. Time isn’t linear, the past lives here alongside the future, and Stelly calls on both in the present. I think she knew she would lose the category, and I loved watching her humility, her perseverance, the process, throughout the day, and watching Kiki step even further into her power with the support that comes with the generative competition of a best friend who tells the truth. At one point, off camera, during make-up, Stelly gets her period and runs out to the car to find tampons. Ruffling through her overnight bag she asks: ‘Yes please, yes please, yes please, yes please’.
By Jen Atherton
Follow up with One Day Pina Asked… (1983), City Girls: Point Blank Period (2018), The Simple Life (2003-2007)
White Dress
Xnorkpowka
5 minutes, 2021
Xnorkpowka presents a trailer to her upcoming film White Dress.
Xnorkpowka - a Soviet artist based in Potts Point - delivers a peak at a TBC longer video. With her trademark silly-seriousness, and populist fuck-it-I-love-you influences, America’s red garbage bin of finessed blue eyed soul searching turns into a fever dream. But, because of 4’s emphasis on ‘no budget’, the trailer for White Dress is more Lizzie G than Lana D. It’s low budget, a ramshackle snippet of something, with someone, wearing a ribbon-knotted ponytail, running through Harris Farms.
‘I had a dream last night that had a watermelon, and a rat, so that might make it…”
Xnorkpowka
By André Shannon
Follow up with Chuck Grant (artist), Treats (2010), Esfir Schub (artist), Brontez Purnell (artist)
Cleave
EO Gill
26 minutes, 2021
A parent seduces their tech savvy son.
Cleave is funny; I know - rare for a film made here. Infused with intentionally cringe screenwriting, two people play with soft incest, while a cheap digicam watches from afar. Starring Sydney shy-cons Athena Thebus and Chloe Corkran, Cleave holds on their nearing breaks and awkward mumbling. This is all phony chit chat inspired by porn. Filmmaker EO Gill shamelessly blends perverted keywords with naughty concepts - Canberranalia, eggs, American dialogue, suburbi-drama, vacuuming, poolboys – into grainy, multi-cam porn.
Aussie cinema militantly opposes American drama (how French of us!) but this work does not. Cleave is a 21st men-tury moment to ponder how surveillance isn’t a site for voyeurism but rather for surfacing imagination.
By André Shannon
Follow up with Multiple Maniacs (1970), Paranormal Activity (2007), I Feel Fantastic (2009)
Vlog Dreams
Shot and starring Bhenji Ra
9 minutes, 2020 - 2021
Artist and filmmaker Bhenji Ra was talking about dating with us, talking about a chat she had with Kilia about when you’re swept up in someone new, and you have to ask yourself ‘is this a moment or a monument?’
Resourceful filmmaking is all about asking that; am I going to capture anything? Is there anything to say or film? And sometimes it’s more substantial with more direct discovery, creativity and accountability than anything that was made with years of processing, and meetings, and money stress, and creative differences. The real gauge for artistic relevance in 2021 is whether anyone cares about your early-Covid responses. Archiving monotony and mediocrity is all a part of survival. Last year when moments of connection were severed, a document of someone just being was life saving. So while Vlog Dreams is basically a Bhenji cough track, it’s also a safe space.
By Jen. Atherton
If you liked this film we suggest: Feng Chen (artist), Scary Movie 3 (2003), Life Is But A Dream (2013)
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Grace Barr
3 minutes, 2020
The ‘happy’ memories of a relationship caught on camera in the bush, illegally, during fourth stage lockdown, was doomed to fail. Prophesying the eventual end to a high-pressure bubble crush; Bridget Jones and the Edge of Civilisation. Originally made for a window display about ‘communicating emotional landscapes long distance’, Grace Barr is back with a spiritual sequel to her thotty truck-stop-audience-favourite Carolina Star (Garden Reflexxx Presents, 2019). My Core is a chilling Covid squeeze rom-com. ‘Chilling’ in that it is both ‘chill’, and ‘ominous’, simultaneously. The 5D camera finds empty spaces, exhaustion, mania and eventually connection. Cinema’s roots are in travelling side-show and Yolanda Frost’s clarinet loop evokes a filmgoing experience from the past where performance was captured and replayed with live, improvised accompaniment made wherever the film reel ended up. What is your covid squeeze soundtrack?
By Jen Atherton
What to watch after: Centre Stage (2000), Into the Wild (2007), Morvern Callar (2002), Joannie 4 Jackie (1995 -)
Post-Script:
gardEvelyn Roth & Weyón
When women or the queers announce their ideas they are often met with the infantilising critique that their ‘naïvity’ is admirable. The work in this festival, while some of it may seem fleeting, or may not live up to some gentrified understanding of production expectation, finds value in what others might see as ‘naïve’.
Still working at 84, Evelyn Roth has been a prolific, multi-disciplinary, and resourceful artist since the sixties. In North America she is held up as a beacon of the promise of the Age of Aquarius, of recycling and coming back to nature, of community care, unionising, protest, renewal, and a child-like wonder at the world around us. Her inflatables have travelled the world, housing stories from different communities, inspiring conversations around dreams and creation on almost every continent. Her commitment to DIY culture, to festivals, to movement, to strong women and dialogue, to mistakes and to creation are in line with our energy, and it is an honour to have her with us tonight with her Chicken House, originally stitched in the late seventies to commemorate the farewell of a dear friend and collaborator Hannelore.
The Chicken House is based on the Slavic Baba Yaga tail but it evokes a kind of cosmic Mayan colour experience that feels like the end of cycle and the start of another. Chickens exist as symbols of food, of beauty, of universality, of routine, of oestrogen and of sacrifice: tonight, the ceremony will be led by musician Weyón. Around and inside the air sculpture we will hear intestinal tracts processing, passing, clogging and emptying to early-Arca trance evoking the fake happy ending of The Descent.
By Jen Atherton
gardenreflexxx.com
Garden Reflexxx presents: 4 took place on Wangal and Gadigal Land of the Eora Nation.
Garden Reflexxx and Pink Flamingo Cinema pay their respects to Elders past, present and emerging and acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded.
The land that this event happened on is and always will be Aboriginal Land.