Monday May 12, 7PM
TANGLED AND FAR
Works by Maximilian Le Cain and Vicky Langan
admission $6 – artists in person (visiting from Ireland)
Still from “Tangled and Far” (Max Le Cain & Vicky Langan, 2013) © Image courtesy of the artists
Microscope Gallery is very pleased to welcome Irish collaborators filmmaker Maximilian Le Cain and sound/performance artist Vicky Langan during one of their rare visits to the US from Cork. The evening includes a selection of short videos made during the last four years, half by Le Cain as a solo artist and the other half as collaborations with Langan. Since 2010, the two have been working together in a creative audio-visual partnership built on the relationship between “Langan’s magnetic, often troublingly intense presence as a performer and Le Cain’s jarring disruptive visual rhythms.”
On Le Cain’s work, filmmaker and critic Donal Foreman writes: “.…distorted and scrambled labyrinth of sound and imagery, as if someone was haunted by a movie but couldn’t quite remember the details or perhaps was in the process of forgetting it as the film progressed.”
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Maximilian Le Cain is an experimental filmmaker based in Cork, Ireland. He frequently works in partnership with sound/performance artist Vicky Langan, and collaborates with Esperanza Collado on the multidisciplinary art project Operation Rewrite. He is a member of the Experimental Film Society collective and the Cinema Cyanide noise project. He received an Irish Arts Council Project Award for the expanded cinema event Gorging Limpet with composer Karen Power, performed during Cork Midsummer Festival in 2013. He is also a film programmer and critic. He was film curator for “Black Sun”, Cork’s regular experimental music/film event, and is editor of Cork Film Centre’s online experimental film journal Experimental Conversations.
Vicky Langan (born 1986) is an Irish artist whose practice operates across several often overlapping fields, chiefly live art, sound, and experimental film. Also a curator, she is known for “Black Sun”, a regular weirdo/outer limits music/film night that took place in Cork and through which she brought many renowned makers of strange sounds from around the world to play in Ireland for the first time.
Program
(approximately 72 min)
Evening Ascent (Maximilian Le Cain, 2010, 5 mins)
Approaching the still centre of an inner storm.
The Mongolian Barbecue (Maximilian Le Cain, 2009, 11 mins)
“The edge of an abyss circumscribed by cinematic possession. The corporeal ritual involved falls at its ultimate climax into the rhythmical interstices of red frames that opens the way to static images from vampire B-movies, the feminine paradise a cinephile could encounter after taking a glimpse at cinema’s interior cavities.” (Esperanza Collado)
Background (Maximilian Le Cain, 2011, 20 mins)
A haunted landscape, perceiving itself by rummaging through fragments of its own cinematic representation.
Hereunder (Vicky Langan/Maximilian Le Cain, 2011, 12 mins)
Hereunder is an intense, fragmented (auto)biographical portrait of Vicky, which sets her adrift amidst lockers of garden shed bric-a-brac from which she summons an ocean of sound.
Dirt (Vicky Langan/Maximilian Le Cain, 2012, 12 mins)
A phantasmagoric mélange of live performances and elements of gothic horror, resulting in a haunting, intense and sometimes humorous portrait of Wölflinge.
Tangled And Far (Vicky Langan/Maximilian Le Cain, 2013, 12 mins)
This video is the most recent collaboration between Vicky Langan and Maximilian Le Cain. Drawing on footage of Langan’s performances over the past two years, as well as scenes specifically shot for this video, it foregrounds the overlap between intimate domestic detail and its reflection in Langan’s performance work. The private and public projections of her presence and actions collapse into each other in this phantasmagoric continuum of alternate selves and self-images to form a fractured dream portrait.
Still from “Background” (Max Le Cain, 2011) © Image courtesy of the artist
