Monday June 22, 7:30pm
A typical murdered beauty
Works by Sasha Janerus and Stephanie Wuertz
as part of YES
admission $6 – artists in person
Still from “Calgon” (Stephanie Wuertz & Sasha Janerus, 2014) – images courtesy of the artists
Microscope welcomes Stephanie Wuertz and Sasha Janerus to the gallery both as solo artists and together in collaboration for a screening of new works on 16mm and video. The evening features the premiere of two cine-poems that “tarry in the cracks of the urban facade”: Janerus’ “4” made from reworked news footage captured by helicopter of the recent police beating of Francis Pusok by the San Bernardino police as he attempted to flee by horse and Wuertz’s 16mm “Untitled (Day/Night)”, filmed by the artist over the past year on the streets of New York and St. Louis.
The pair’s 2014 collaboration “Calgon” reworks footage from an advertisement starring Barbi Benton on the secret to achieving soft skin. And Wuertz’s new music video for Alice Cohen’s “Into The Grey Salons” is three minutes of found 16mm outtakes and discarded optical printing tests “enwrought with golden and silver light”.
An interview with the artists by Enrico Camporesi will appear in the forthcoming issue of La Furia Umana, and their film Calgon will be screened at the upcoming Fronteira festival, Brazil. The night is taking place as part of YES, our new program of emerging artists launched this month.
Program:
Calgon
Stephanie Wuertz and Sasha Janerus, video, 2014, 15 minutes
An autoerotic odyssey in three or more parts, starring Barbi Benton and a box of soap.
“Softness could mean both a flowing together and a flowing apart of definitions.” – Claes Oldenburg
4
Sasha Janerus, video, 2015, 21 minutes
Raw news copter footage of Francis Pusok’s attempted equestrian escape from and subsequent beating by, San Bernardino’s finest, fragmented and scrambled to release its latent, mythic significance.
Untitled (Day/Night)
Stephanie Wuertz, 16mm film, 2015, 25 minutes
A collection of observations shot over the year on the streets of New York and St. Louis that reflect the city, on the one hand as a space for construction and administration and on the other as a fragmentary and contradictory place for subjectivity. “…A mobile human tapestry continually fraying continually being repaired.”(Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant)
Music video for Alice Cohen’s “Into The Grey Salons”
Stephanie Wuertz, 16mm film, 2015, 3 minutes
Found footage of unwanted outtakes and optical printing tests.
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Stephanie Wuertz is an artist, filmmaker and curator based in Brooklyn, New York. The bulk of her work is carried out in relation to the institutions and concerns of postwar American avant-garde and underground film, and is committed to continuing its tradition of formal acuity, criticality and liberatory politics. Wuertz has previously shown her work, among others, at Microscope Gallery, Silent Barn, New Museum, Eyebeam, Spectacle Theater, Anthology Film Archives, Millennium Film Workshop, and San Francisco Cinematheque.
Sasha Janerus is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer, filmmaker, curator and musician.
Still from “4” (Sasha Janerus, 2015) – image courtesy of the artist
