Exhibition: January 22 - March 2, 2018, Galleries, Cummings Arts Center
Artist's Talk: Thursday, February 15, 4:15 p.m., Oliva Hall, Cummings Arts Center
Opening reception: Thursday, February 15, 5:30 p.m., Galleries, Cummings Arts Center

Gallery Hours:   Monday-Friday, 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.; 1 - 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday

Dayton Visiting Artist Natalie Bookchin is an artist and filmmaker who, through virtuosic editing and innovative sonic and visual montage, interrogates the American crisis and its increased inequality and polarization as well as the seismic impact of the digital tools and platforms that determine the shape and texture of contemporary life.

Her critically acclaimed films and installations have shown around the world at museums, galleries, theaters, and festivals, including at MoMA, LACMA, PS1, Mass MOCA, the Walker Art Center, the Pompidou Centre, MOCA LA, the Whitney Museum, the Tate, and Creative Time. She has received numerous grants and awards, including from Creative Capital, California Arts Council, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Durfee Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, California Community Foundation, the Daniel Langlois Foundation, a COLA Artist Fellowship, the Center for Cultural Innovation, the MacArthur Foundation, a NYSCA Individual Artist Fellowship, a NYFA Opportunity Grant and most recently a NYSCA/MAAF award, among others.

Recent works include Long Story Short a dizzying multiplicity of frames and voices –unadorned testimony from people living in poverty that visualizes a collective body, with overlapping subjectivities, interdependencies, and potential alliances. The film premiered at The Museum of Modern Art in New York and won the Grand Prize at Cinema du Reel at the Pompidou Center Paris in 2016. Now he’s out in public and everyone (2012/2017), explores the stirrings of a darker, nihilistic, and polarized environment the internet helped to produce. It premiered at Cinema du Reel in March 2017 where it received Special Mention.

Bookchin is a professor of Media and Associate Chair in the Visual Arts Department at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. She lives in Brooklyn.

Network Effects

Network Effects presents media works by Bookchin made over the past decade on themes ranging from mass isolation and unemployment to the rise of white nationalism in America.  It features LONG STORY SHORT, a film that deploys a dizzying multiplicity of frames and voices and features deeply moving, unadorned testimony from over 100 people facing poverty in America. Also on view will be NOW HE’S OUT IN PUBLIC AND EVERYONE CAN SEE, a riveting and racially charged account of an unnamed man, drawn from an archive of video blogger’s rantings and musings as they describe, judge, and prescribe the places and positions of black men in America. Other works in the exhibition address the blurred lines between public and private space in our “always on” society.

This is one of the featured exhibitions for the 16th Biennial Symposium on Arts & Technology organized by the Ammerman Center for Arts & Technology at Connecticut College. Additional support for the exhibition, which is curated by Nadav Assor, is provided by the Connecticut College Studio Art Department and the Dayton Visiting Artist fund. 

List of works in the exhibition

Long Story Short (2016, Courtesy Icarus Films)

In the moving and immersive Long Story Short, over 100 people at homeless shelters, food banks, adult literacy programs, and job training centers in L.A. and the Bay Area discuss their experiences of poverty: why they are poor, how it feels, and what they think should be done about American poverty and homelessness today. While individuals whom Bookchin filmed in separate spaces appear on screen in their own visual spaces, mirroring the isolation of their experiences, words flow between them like a musical ensemble. Together in the film for the first time, Americans who are rarely acknowledged or listened to form a virtual collective.

Now He's Out in Public and Everyone Can See (2012,2017, Courtesy Icarus Films)

A riveting account of an unnamed man whose racial identity is repeatedly redrawn and contested by masses of impassioned vloggers. This intricately edited, deeply political film explores our new social landscape, one where cascades of disinformation, rumors, and insinuations spread wildly across electronic networks.

Testament (4 Chapters, 2009-2007)

Testament presents a series of collective expressions of the shared self. The series reflects on the peculiar blend of intimacy and anonymity, of the simultaneous connectivity and isolation of contemporary social relations.

Mass Ornament (2009) 

“With a keen eye for detail, a terrific sense of timing and a killer instinct for editing, [Bookchin] has clipped and combined hundreds of vignettes from YouTube and set them to the soundtracks from Busby Berkeley’s GOLD DIGGERS OF 1935 and Leni Riefenstahl’s TRIUMPH OF THE WILL. […] To watch the split-screen extravaganza is to feel as if you are at once enjoying a god’s-eye view of a vast, everyday parade of vulnerable human beings and also an intimate part of a democratic drama that is deeply moving.” –The Los Angeles Times

Keywords

Labor
Poverty
Identity
Race
Cultural critique
Youtube
Performance
Selfie
Documentary
Dance
Chorus
Private
Public

See the complete Connecticut College event release, Natalie Bookchin's Exhibition of Media Works.