Evergreen Art Lecture Series

 Ben Russell is a media artist and curator whose films, installations, and performances foster a deep engagement with the history and semiotics of the moving image. Formal investigations of the historical and conceptual relationships between early cinema, documentary practices, and structuralist filmmaking result in immersive experiences concerned at once with ritual, communal spectatorship and the pursuit of a “psychedelic ethnography.”

A 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship and 2010 FIPRESCI award recipient, Ben has had solo screenings and exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Viennale, and the Museum of Modern Art.  He began the Magic Lantern screening series in Providence, Rhode Island, was co-director of the artist-run space BEN RUSSELL in Chicago, IL, has toured worldwide with film/ video/ performance programs and was named by Cinemascope in 2012 as one of the “50 Best Filmmakers Under 50.”  Ben lives between Los Angeles and Paris, France.

Ben’s most recent, co-directed feature – A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS – is screening on Friday, November 14th at the Olympia Film Festival in downtown Olympia, at 4:45 pm.

Dan Attoe was born in 1975 in Bremerton, Washington.  He grew up in parts of Washingon, Idaho, Minnesota and Wisconsin, and now lives in Washougal, Washington.  He received his BFA from the University of Wisconsin in ’98 and his MFA from the University of Iowa in ’04. Dan is represented by Peres Projects Berlin, Western Exhibitions in Chicago and Fourteen30 Contemporary in Portland, Oregon.  He has had several solo shows in Los Angeles, Chicago and Berlin, as well as several throughout Europe.

His most recent gallery solo shows were Landscapes with Water, at Peres Projects in Berlin in March 2014, and Dan Attoe at 1430 Contemporary in Portland in May 2014.  Dan has been in numerous group shows in galleries all over the world and several museums – including the Portland Art Museum.  He worked with and was part of the inspiration for a line of clothing by fashion designer Adam Kimmel in 2011.  Dan is also one of the founders of the art collaborative Paintallica whose most recent installation was at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines. He enjoys the beauty and the culture in the Northwest and Portland where he sometimes teaches courses at Portland State University.

Emily Abendroth is a poet, teacher and anti-prison activist. Much of her creative work attempts to investigate state regimes of force and power, as well as individual and collective resistance strategies to the same. Her poetry book, ]Exclosures[, was just released from AEmily AbendrothPress this May. Her works are often published in limited edition, handcrafted chapbooks by small and micropresses such as Belladonna (New York), Horse Less Press (Denver), Little Red Leaves (Texas), Albion Press (Philadelphia), and Zumbar Press (San Francisco). She is an active organizer with Decarcerate PA (a grassroots campaign working to end mass incarceration in Pennsylvania) and is co-founder of Address This! (an education and empowerment project that provides innovative, social justice correspondence courses to individuals incarcerated in Pennsylvania).

 For the past 28 years, Deidi von Schaewen has traveled in India, immersing herself in its people and culture, and exploring themes through her photography and video.  For her series on the Sacred Trees, she traveled the length and breadth of India.  The exhibition in Evergreen Gallery is an opportunity to view these lush, complex images in large-scale, to be surrounded by their energy and power.Born in Berlin, von Schaewen studied painting at the Berlin Academy of Arts before deciding to concentrate on photography and film.  Currently she is based in Paris.  She has exhibited extensively throughout Europe, India, North Africa, and the US.  Twenty books of her photographs have been published, with one about Sacred Trees of India due out next year.  A continuing obsession of hers is to capture on film the ephemeral, aspects of our urban and rural civilizations that are temporary, fleeting, or vanishing with time.  For the Sacred Trees of India, it is more a revelation of devotion and accumulation over time, the ability of trees to survive, rejuvenate, transform – in India, trees are not only sacred to the gods, they can actually BE gods.

Evergreen Gallery is extremely pleased to announce the fall exhibition, Sacred Trees of India: Photographs by Deidi von Schaewen.  The exhibition in Evergreen Gallery is an opportunity to view these lush, complex images in large-scale, to be surrounded by their energy and power.

Von Schaewen was director of photography for a feature film by Robert Cordier in 1972 – a time when it was unusual for a woman to be in that position.  She continued as director of photography on other films, and in 1978 she began writing and directing her own films.  One of her films, Sravanabelgola, will be showing in Evergreen Gallery as part of the exhibition.

Opening Wed. Oct. 8, 5-7pm
Exhibition continues through Dec. 3

The series takes place in Lecture Hall 1 at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, on 4-5 Wednesdays per quarter, from 11:30-1:00 pm. Free to the public, Evergreen’s visual arts programs offer an opportunity to hear local, national and international interdisciplinary artists, writers and art workers speak about their work.

The fall 2014 series will present artists and writers who were chosen (albeit loosely) with the year’s theme of “paying attention” in mind. The theme comes from the orientation book Crow Planet by Lyanda Lynn Haupt. Please join us in welcoming these artists to our campus.

Week 2  10/8 Deidi von Schaewen, photographer. Her exhibition The Sacred Trees of India, will be in the Evergreen Gallery in October.

Week 3 10/15 Emily Abendroth, poet

Week 4 10/22: Dan Attoe, painter

Week 6 11/5: Gretchen Bennett, visual artist

Week 8 11/19: Ben Russell, filmmaker

The Art Lecture Series is facilitated by Shaw Osha,  oshas@evergreen.edu

CAConrad is the author of seven books including ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (Wave Books, 2014), A BEAUTIFUL MARSUPIAL AFTERNOON (WAVE Books, 2012) and The Book of Frank (WAVE Books, 2010).  A 2014 Lannan Fellow, a 2013 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2011 Pew Fellow, he also conducts workshops on (Soma)tic poetry and Ecopoetics.  Visit him online at http://CAConrad.blogspot.com

Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence, a collection of fiction-essays focused on myth-making and black presences in film, literature and visual art. Archival research, montage and collage and various forms of retelling and reenactment feature prominently in both her creative and critical practice.  She is co-editor and publisher of the cross-referenced journal of narrative and storytelling possibility, The Encyclopedia Project, and co-editor of War Diaries, an anthology on black gay men’s desire and survival, and nominated for a 2010 LAMBDA Literary Award.  She recently completed a year-long reunion tour with the poets and writers of The Dark Room Collective, celebrating the 25th anniversary of their nationally-renown African diasporic arts exhibition and reading series. Her writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Animal Shelter, Black Clock, Bombay Gin, Mandorla, Mixed Blood, The Reanimation Library’s Word Processor Series, and Viz, as well as in the catalogues and exhibits for visual artists Laylah Ali, Jaime Cortez, Wura-Natasha Ogunji and Cauleen Smith. A board member for the newly inaugurated Thinking Its Presence: Race & Creative Writing annual conference, Tisa Bryant fiction and hybrid forms in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts, where she also serves as Interim Co-Director of Equity & Diversity.   She lives in Los Angeles.