SUSPENSION BRIDGES: FILMS BY ALEE PEOPLES

SUSPENSION BRIDGES: FILMS BY ALEE PEOPLES

(1980/2008-2023, 16mm and digital, approx 60 min)

With filmmaker Alee Peoples in attendance

Swingsets, balloons, air dancers, drooping flags, and sagging billboards: Los Angeles-based artist Alee Peoples builds her witty and beguiling experimental films around images of barely-tethered and precariously-suspended things. Films like STANDING FORWARD FULL (2020) and IF YOU CAN’T SEE MY MIRRORS, I CAN’T SEE YOU (2016) strike odd balances between universal cultural touchstones and inscrutable in-jokes, constructing elegant counterpoints of sound and image that bridge incongruous phenomena. Her cinematography isolates pockets of deep strangeness within the banal textures of LA urban geography, while her soundtracks break apart familiar songs and discourses with abrupt discordances, allowing uncanny meanings to spring up between the cracks. Taking sly aim against authoritarianism in DECOY (2017) or playing the indignities of aging during a pandemic for comic relief in HEY SWEET PEA (2023), Peoples’s humor rebounds against the hard realities of contemporary American life, suggesting that if you pull hard enough on the right loose thread, any edifice might come tumbling down.

For this screening, Peoples will appear in person for a program of her short films, presented alongside a work by pioneering video artist Dara Birnbaum.

FILMS SCREENED:

PM Magazine/Acid Rock by Dara Birnbaum (1980, 4:13, video)

Appropriating material from the introduction to the nightly television show, PM Magazine and a commercial for Wang Computers, Birnbaum uses enlarged still-frames from each of the sources to compound a new image of the indelible American Dream. To the soundtrack of an acid rock version of The Doors' L.A. Woman, repetitive images of an ice skater, baton twirler, cheerleader, and young girls licking ice cream, exemplify dominant cultural images of women — images that emphasize their performative nature: the idea that woman is a spectacle arranged for the (male) viewer's pleasure. -Video Data Bank

THEM ORACLES (2012, 7.5 min, 16mm)

THEM ORACLES is a skeptic investigation of what an oracle can be and what it would sound like. Human desire and blind faith allow, and maybe even will, these mystic soothsayers to exist.

BOYS OF SUMMER (2009, 12:24, Super 8mm to digital)

Boys of Summer is a pop music essay that is both sweet and serious about the object of desire. Tongue-in-cheek objectifying is mixed with symbols of lust and desire along with a brief history of a fraternal order, The Hooded Mask. Eat ice cream while standing on the beach, listening to Phil Collins, starring into the sun.

CROWNING GLORY (2008, 5 min, Super-8mm-to-digital)

CROWNING GLORY highlights parallel feelings of pride and ownership versus skepticism and rebellion. A collection of American symbols that adorn the head, this film resuscitates them with psychic-punk aesthetics.

DECOY (2017, 10.5 min, 16mm)

DECOY sees bridges and walls as binary opposites and relates them to impostors in this world. Humans strive for accuracy. You don’t always get what you wish for.

STANDING FORWARD FULL (2020, 5.5 min, 16mm)

A helter skelter is an amusement ride with a spiral slide built around a tower. Like this film, an exorcism attempt of an unrequited desire, it’s either moving too fast or at a complete standstill. Disorienting but exciting.

HEY SWEET PEA (2023, 11 min, 16mm)

Parental aging and an existential wave collide together in funny ways. HEY SWEET PEA borrows scenes from the 1984 children’s sci-fi movie THE NEVERENDING STORY to process our collective grief.

Total running time: 57 min

About the filmmaker:

Alee Peoples maintains a varied artistic practice that involves screen-printing, sewing, sculpture and film. Currently living in Los Angeles, she has taught youth classes at Echo Park Film Center and shown her sculpture and film work at GAIT, 4th Wall and elephant. Peoples has shown her films at numerous festivals including Edinburgh, Images (Toronto) and New York Film Festival, and at museums and spaces including SFMoMA, Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Pompidou Center, Dirt Palace (Providence) and The Nightingale (Chicago). Started in 2022, Arroyo Seco Cine Club is a thematically programmed film series she co-curates with Mike Stoltz. She is inspired by pedestrian histories, pop song lyrics and invested in the hand-made.

Event Venue

Block Museum of Art, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston, United States