Thursday April 8 * 7pm Eastern * RSVP to receive link
MILOTI Program is a curated screening of contemporary film and video work showcasing artists with a connection to the state of Ohio. Typically, the screening is used as a catalyst for community to come and be together. Each program travels when possible. All types of film and video and people are welcome to submit and attend.
MILOTI began in April 2017 as a screening focused on moving image artists living and working in the central Ohio area. The event found great reception. Program One was screened at Milo Arts in Columbus and traveled to The Mini Microcinema in Cincinnati, OH early the next year where it met an equally welcoming audience. Since then, MILOTI Program has opened up to any artist bearing a connection to Ohio, and has continued to travel. We look forward to starting a relationship with Rhizome DC this year, and to continue presenting solid work from solid individuals.
MILOTI Program Three Artist Bios
Diana Abells
Diana Abells (b. 1989, Massachusetts) is a visual artist based in Columbus, Ohio. She teaches as a lecturer for the department of art at The Ohio State University, and is a 2021 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award recipient.
“My art practice is rooted in moving image and collage. In my videos and installations I create immersive and experimental narratives that pull the viewer into a familiar yet alien world. I cut and paste. My raw materials include my own recorded footage, movies, TV shows, newscasts, and uploads from YouTube superstars and nobodies. My video work functions in relation to the familiar experiences of TV and internet video but moves to disrupt traditional content. Collage is closely tied to the notion of the remix. This process of re-contextualizing familiar images and symbols to create new content is fundamental in the age of the internet and I use it to examine how culture builds myths, defines what’s ordinary, and incites emotion.
I seek out worlds where meaning and perception are constantly in flux, leading to bizarre narratives. To begin I dip into my own memories, misunderstandings, and desires. Childhood is my guide as I look for a time of instability between experience and thought, and examine how meaning shifts as one learns new points of connection between objects, places, and situations.”
Portfolio site: dianabells.info
Dan Jian
Dan Jian (b.1986, Lichuan, China) creates visual work that explores an inner world of stored images and reflects on the changing spaces of landscape, narrative, and memory. She currently lives in Fort Worth, Texas, where she maintains a studio practice and is an assistant professor of Art at Texas Christian University.
Portfolio site: danjian.info
Kellie Bornhoft
Kellie Bornhoft’s (she/her) practice seeks tangible and poetic narratives needed in an ever-warming climate. Bornhoft utilizes sculpture, installation and video to delve into the whelms and quotidian experiences of our precarious times. Scientific data and news headlines do plenty to evince the state of our warming planet, but the abject realities of such facts are hard to possess. Through geological and more-than-human lenses, Bornhoft sifts through shallow dichotomies (such as natural/unnatural, here/there, or animate/inanimate.) Bornhoft is currently working in the Bay Area of California. She holds a MFA in Sculpture + Expanded Media from Ohio State University and a BFA from Watkins College of Art and Design. Bornhoft’s work has exhibited internationally in museums, galleries and film festivals such as the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, North Carolina, Kulturanker in Magdeburg, Germany, and the Athens International Film and Video Festival. Bornhoft’s work has been reviewed in many publications including Frieze Magazine, Burnaway, INDYweek and ArtsATL.
Bill Brown
Bill Brown is a filmmaker, a photographer, and an author who has produced the films Buffalo Common, Confederation Park, Hub City, Mountain State, The Other Side, and Roswell. He is the author of all 14 issues of the zine Dream Whip and the book Saugus to the Sea. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Claudia Esslinger
Claudia Esslinger is a visual artist working in media-based installation, video layering and projection, new media video constructs and collaborative performance. Her installations often invite interactivity using micro-controllers and sculptural components. Her single and multi-channel video projections include those appropriate for gallery exhibitions, film festivals or as components for music or dance performances. A common thematic thread through her projects is a poetic exploration of inequities and inconsistencies in both the human and natural worlds. By juxtaposing challenging and ironic elements within provocative aesthetic forms, she opens her work to a wide range of interpretation.
Esslinger's work often includes visceral props that embrace a performer or receive moving projections. From rawhide and pig intestine to rust covered divining rods, from the pulsing of mechanical bellows to a notched stick measuring drops of water, her explorations are meant to elicit visceral experiences. Natural surfaces are often bracketed by clean industrial or technical elements, such as stainless-steel mesh or high-definition displays. Viewers are invited to immerse themselves, often affecting changes in various components through physical manipulations.
The projections of single-channel digital films are formatted to function as gallery installations or as film festival “shorts”. Multi-channel works and video loops are more suited to gallery exhibition with multiple displays or projections, although single-channel versions of these are sometimes appropriate and available. Collaboration with composers, writers, scientists, performers, and dancers have enhanced Esslinger's semi-narrative, semi-abstract video projects. Collaborations also have led to live control of video (using interactive software) or to screenings during live performances. These presentations have taken place internationally including in Seoul and Berlin.
Esslinger has been the recipient of seven Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards and a New Forms Regional Grant (NEA). Artist’s residencies include the Omora Ethnobotanical Preserve near Cape Horn (2009), Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California (2007), Singing Pictures workshop in Seoul, South Korea (2000) and the Grafikwerkstaadt in Dresden, Germany (1999).
Nancy Kangas
Nancy Kangas is a poet and teaching artist based in Columbus. She has poetry in numerous journals and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry column, “Slides (Interpreted by Nancy),” regularly appears in Ohio Edit. She writes humor for Muse (a magazine for 9 to 14 year olds) and began her writing career editing the acclaimed Nancy’s Magazine. Organizations that have sponsored her residencies include the Ohio Arts Council, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Thurber House. Preschool Poets, which she co-directed and produced, features poems composed by some of her students.
@nancykangas
Josh Kun
Josh Kun, an award-winning director and cinematographer, studied documentary film at Chapman University in Los Angeles. For five years he traveled the United States producing short documentaries for the Dutch-based television production company, Metropolis. He is now based Columbus, and works as a freelance director of photography on a wide range of commercial and theatrical film projects.
@oakhousefilms
www.oakhousefilms.com
Lynn Kim
Lynn Kim is a Korean-American filmmaker and educator who was born and raised in Queens, New York. She is a graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design and is an artist who utilizes animation, abstraction, experimental techniques, and the mix-n'-matching of various disciplines in her work.
As of 2020, she is teaching courses in the Digital Storytelling major at the University of Missouri as an Assistant Teaching Professor.
Prior to that, she completed her graduate studies at the Ohio State University and worked as manager of the Media Lab at the Children's Museum of the Arts to teach animation and filmmaking in local New York communities. As a teacher she has worked with museums, private and public academic institutions, colleges, and non-profit organizations.
She has had the fortune of exhibiting and competing in international festivals and shows including: The Ottawa International Animation Festival, the Baryshnikov Arts Center, The Margulies Collection, Rooftop Films and the Melbourne International Animation Festival.
At heart, Lynn is a lover of animation, collisions between art and science, drawings made in unexpected places, and shared meals with good folks. She is interested in meaningful teaching, the moving image, and the consumption of breakfast food at all hours.
Lynn can be contacted via e-mail at: lkimfav@gmail.com
Always happy to hear from others!
Dani ReStack
Dani (Leventhal) Restack describes the creation of her moving-image works as a process of “accumulation and excision.” In videos such as Sister City and the companion piece Platonic (both 2013), Restack collects and chisels moments, stories, and images, placing them within loose constellations rarely unmarked by the specter of death. Restack shoots her own footage, often involving individuals who are close to her, but treats the resulting images almost as a bank of found material to be manipulated and recontextualized through montage. Her cutting is intuitive, not systematic. Micro-narratives of birth, aging, awkwardness, and pain gradually take shape without ever fully congealing, as Restack allows her images to breathe even as she transforms their tenor through assemblage. The textures of the everyday are refracted through an intimate sensibility that dwells in the vulnerability of our fleshy bodies, our need for care and communion—and our cruelty.
Restack frequently turns to animals—dead and living, domesticated and wild—as part of her exploration of how bodies, of whatever species, inhabit the world. She pays no mind to traditional hierarchies, allowing not just horses and cats into her bestiary, but roadkill and anemones, too. A similarly egalitarian ethos pervades her organization of the many fragments she brings together in these lo-fi, diaristic works. The utterly commonplace might stand next to a fleeting moment of beauty or a recounted episode of brutality—all are accorded equal status under Restack's gaze. The fragile bodies and relationships between people that appear onscreen find themselves redoubled by the delicacy of the accords between Restack's images and sounds: a snake fiercely devouring a mouse cuts to a child in a superhero costume; a luminous jellyfish is accompanied by asynchronous sound, in which a woman asks incredulously, “How can someone say there’s no God?” In other hands, the combination of radically heterogeneous materials can figure as a violent leveling of specificity. Restack, however, brings a tremendous sensitivity to the unlikely connections she forges, creating force fields of affinity and difference that extend across human, animal, and environment.
—2017 Whitney Biennial catalogue remarks by Erika Balsom
Sheilah ReStack
"Conflating the miraculous with notions of chance and arbitrariness, Sheilah [Wilson] ReStack’s work alludes to religious motifs from a perspective of a sincere and heartbroken skeptic. It often centers around the empty center, an impossibility that she bravely faces while connecting history, land and personal experience into fluid and surprising actions within her artistic practice."
from Interview with Leeza Meksin for
Temporary Contemporary, December 2012.
ReStack has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. Awards include Nova Scotia Talent Trust recipient (2002-4), Creative Capital Foundation Scholarship (2007), Canada Council Travel Grant (2008), Denison University Research Funding (2010, 2013, 2017, 2018, 2019), Banff Center thematic residency scholarship with Adam Chodzko (2011), Canada Council Project Grant (2012, 2015), Howard Foundation Photography Grant (2016), Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence (2014, 2019), Union Docs Fellowship (2019). ReStack’s work has been commissioned for the Museum of Fine Arts of Santa Fe, Balloon Museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico, OSU Urban Art Spaces, W(here) festival in Pictou County, Columbia College Chicago, Whitney Museum of American Art, Ross Creek Center for the Arts, Confederation Arts Centre and others. ReStack’s work investigates the necessity of rupture and precarity in feminist and queer narrative and material structures.
Kevin Vanscoder
Kevin Vanscoder is an experimental filmmaker, installation artist, poet, and quilt-maker based in scenic Columbus, oh. His work has been featured in the Wexner Center’s Ohio Shorts, at festivals, and shows across the country. His current experimental shorts series (@riverdrawnfilms) uses hand drawn animation, watercoloring, a bit of rambling guitar, and, of course, videos of his son River as his muse.
Natasha Woods
Natasha Woods was born in (New Hampton), Iowa, and is currently based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At the forefront of Woods' films lies an interest in the material and sensory qualities that moving image production makes possible. In her work, Woods aims to reclaim space on the screen by investigating microhistories and challenging conventions of storytelling. Her work navigates the tension between the desire for human tenderness and the hopeful expectations of a better world. To underscore these possibilities, she explores themes that build upon landscapes, personal/familial ephemera, and found footage. Through the manipulation of appropriated artifacts and performance, Woods considers larger ideas concerned with nostalgia, trauma, and memory. To this end, she attempts to reposition canonical histories and traditions through a feminist lens, posing questions that grapple with how the subject senses comfort and belonging.
In 2018, she received a degree in film and video from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She is the recipient of the 2020 Mary Nohl award in the emerging artist category. Her films have screened at various moving image festivals including Milwaukee Film, Athens International Film Festival, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival and is currently on tour with a traveling program curated by No Evil Eye Cinema (Ohio.)