ANIMAL ART of
William Wegman, Carolee Schneemann, Sam Easterson,
and others to Be Presented

Charlottesville, VA - The 13th annual Virginia Film Festival, scheduled for Thursday, October 26th through Sunday, October 29th, 2000, is proud to announce that Festival guest artists William Wegman and Carolee Schneeman will display photographic works at the Bayly Art Museum, located on the University of Virginia Grounds. This year's Film Festival has an unusually large number of visual artists, including Sam Easterson, Leah Gilliam, Beatrix Ost, and Animal Charm, whose experimental media art will be exhibited and demonstrated. The exhibitions all develop the theme of this year's Festival, Animal Attractions, on representations of animals in the media.

From fairy tales to fashion, in photographs and film, William Wegman's talented Wiemeraners are among the most recognizable art images of the twentieth century. Wegman will present his films and videos, including Hardly Gold and Reel 9, on Saturday, October 28th at 7:00 p.m. at the Regal Downtown Mall. Wegman will also deliver the Museum's annual Gladys S. Blizzard Lecture at 2 p.m. on Sunday, October 29th in Campbell Hall at. In addition, several photographs by Wegman will be on display in the Museum's major Charlottesville Collects exhibition. In accord with the Festival theme, the Bayly.

On Saturday, September 26th, the Bayly Art Museum will open "Infinity Kisses: II, 1981-1987," a photographic installation by noted multimedia and feminist artist Carolee Schneemann, on view through November 26th. The show consists of 24 laser images, each 8 x 10 inches, printed from 35mm color film. The photographs will be displayed in the stairwell of the Museum and are best viewed from the second floor landing.

"Infinity Kisses" continues Schneeman's dissolution of the boundaries between human and animal reason and the irrational. The images capture the expressive self-determination of her cat in recurring sequences as he ritually and ardently kisses Schneeman on the mouth. Photographed over an eight-year period with a hand-held 35mm camera using available light with uncertain focus, the images raise questions of interspecies communication as well as triggering unexpected cultural taboos.

Schneemann, a featured artist sponsored by the McIntire Department of Art during the Festival, will present a rare screening of Kitch's Last Meal. This dual-projector Super 8mm work is the final film in her Autobiographical Trilogy and features her cat Kitch, an artistic collaborator on the classic film "Fuses" and other artworks. Schneemann's screening is on Friday, October 27th at 10 p.m. at the Vinegar Hill Theater.

Since the 1960s, Schneeman has exhibited her paintings and kinetic sculpture while extending the boundaries of performance, video and film. A 1993 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, her work has been shown most recently at the Whitney Museum of Art; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Venice Biennale; The Museum of Modern Art and Exit Art in New York; and the Walker Art Center. Schneeman is also a recognized writer and lecturer. Her books include More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings (1979), Early and Recent Work (1983) and Video Burn (1991).

ANIMAL ART IN THE IX BUILDING

A mammoth art exhibition entitled "Animal Attractions" will feature works dealing with the fears, memories, dreams and reflections concerning animals by the faculty of the McIntire Department of Art including William Bennett, Dean Dass, James Hagan, Suzi Fox, Elizabeth Schoyer, and William Wylie as well as hundreds of their students in works including everything from drawings to digital media.

Sculptor Sam Easterson will be presenting a new piece at the Ix Building entitled "Animal, Vegetable, Video: Arachnida" The exhibit will feature video footage that has been captured from the point of view of a spider and a scorpion. It will also feature taxidermic specimens of a spider and a scorpion that will 'model' the micro video cameras that he placed on the live arachnids in the field. Using extension cords, he will also create two large topographic maps on the floor of the gallery (each map will depict the region where he did his videotaping). Easterson's "Animal, Vegetable, Video" series collects video footage from the point of view of animals and plants, and videos from this series will be screened and discussed by Easterson at Vinegar Hill Theater in the Film Festival's "Animal Other" program at 4:00pm on October 27.

Also exhibited will be new human-animal sculptures and paintings by Charlottesville-based artist Beatrix Ost, collectively titled ANIMAL HOUSING, or: The Domesticated Human.

"Animal Attractions" will be on display in the Frank Ix Building, just two blocks from the Downtown Mall, during the Festival weekend. The show will be open from Thursday, October 26 through Sunday, October 29 from 1:00 - 7:00pm. The Ix Building is located on Elliott Street between Ridge and Avon Streets.

ANIMAL CHARM

Animal Charm, media artists who perform live video sampling of mass media products, will give a live video performance on Friday, October 27th at 7:00 p.m. at the Vinegar Hill Theatre. Through appropriation and reassemblage, their works upset the hypnotic spectacle of TV viewing, exposing the tragic underbelly of corporate message-making - in particular, the way it suppresses nature and preys on human vulnerability.

In addition to their live video mixing performance, Animal Charm will demonstrate their mixing techniques at a "Cabaret" in the Downtown Artspace, located under the Jefferson Theater on the Downtown Mall on Saturday, October 28th at 3 p.m. A collaborative project of Chicago sound and media artists Rich Bott and Jim Fetterley, Animal Charm are asking audience members to bring in home videos of pets to throw into the mix.

Graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Bott and Fetterley dive into the dumpsters of video production companies and go through countless hours of industrial, documentary and corporate video footage, often editing the tapes in a live mix session before an audience. By re-editing images derived from a wide variety of sources, they scramble media codes, creating a kind of tic-ridden, convulsive babble, often reinvesting conventional forms with subversive meanings.

LEAH GILLIAM'S SPLIT AND OTHER NEW MEDIA

Leah Gilliam's CD-ROM Split, based on her research into primatology and science fiction, exploits footage from an obscure 8mm trailer for The Planet of the Apes to highlight the unstable relationship between the real historical past and the distant imaginary future. Gilliam's work in new media obsessively looks back at outmoded media technologies, and has earned her growing acclaim as a major new artist. She was recently given the 1999 Creative Capital Foundation Award, as well as having a lengthy record of other awards and residencies after receiving an M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1991. Gilliam will present and navigate through her works, including her new website, at the Robertson Media Center in Clemons Library on the U.Va. Grounds on Friday, October 27th at 2 p.m.