still from A Valley Without Trees
Wednesday November 30 * 7pm * TICKETS
Join us for a screening of recent works by Janelle VanderKelen, and stay for a Q-and-A after the program conducted with the artist over Zoom.
Janelle VanderKelen is an artist, curator, and educator based in Milwaukee, WI. Her films and intermedia installations imagine alternative acts of relation between imperfect bodies (human, vegetal, geological, or otherwise) and make the agency of plants visible through experimental time-based media processes. She co-curates a monthly screening series called aCinema and teaches film and video at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she received both her MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres and her MA in Intermedia Art.
Vegetal Beings // Recent Works by Janelle VanderKelen
A Valley Without Trees, 2021, 16mm transferred to video + Sound, 6:00.
In "A Valley Without Trees," the lowly onion that burrows into the soil and spends most of its life underground is cast as an interpreter or potential sensory prosthetic that offers a different way of understanding (and perhaps communicating with) the land, planet, and cosmos in which it grows.
Language Unknown, 2022, 16mm transferred to video + Sound, 6:10.
This film embraces plant sentience as fact and speculates how beings of the vegetal variety might approach interspecies communication with humans (who are far more sensorially limited). Leaves, mycelia, and roots playfully examine how humans experience the world, and the (supposedly) silent watchers consider what language those swift blurs of human might possibly understand.
The Floating World, 2019, Video + Sound, 17:00.
Interactions between humans, plants, and animals in the urban environment highlight the weird position of the city-scape as a fabricated extension of nature that poses unique concerns as the earth warms.
Clara: Forever Summer, 2016, Video + Sound, 8:00.
The repetitive motions of the canning process quietly remap the accreted horrors of female labor that intervenes in the lifespan of a vegetable arrested in forever-summer. A circuitous wandering explores this process and confuses conceptions of time and space as seasons accumulate into undifferentiated years of feminine relation to and reinvention of natural growth cycles. The physical constraints of the domestic and embodied architectures are eventually completely subverted by the excessive act of preservation.
The Neighbors, 2016, Video + Sound, 12:00.
A diaristic exploration of intimacy forced through sonic bleed, this piece examines the blurring of public/private boundaries and details an individual’s honest attempt to foster relationships. Agency is asserted as aural pollution is subverted. The subjunctive turns into reality.
Grey Blue And, 2015, Video + Sound, 5:30.
The ephemera of identity rubbed-off: leavings generated by the body and traces of things beloved coalesce into a portrait of that which is lost. The past susurrates uneasily in an act of remembering, dragged along anachronistically by textures of color and the taste of dust.
Ambrosia, 2017, Video + Sound, 4:30.
Inspired by the transformations in Ovid's Metamorphoses that linger as explanations for why and how the world is, this piece transposes the notion of transition and transmutation across imagery of hybrid statues and a cleansing of hands with honey- the rejuvenating food of the gods that purportedly grants eternal life.
still from Language Unknown
You can check https://www.rhizomedc.org/about-rhizomedc for up-to-date covid policies.