A selection of film shorts by graduating MFA students Leticia Bernaus, Danny Carroll, Kylie Renee Clark, and Tamara Becerra Valdez from the School of Art & Art History at University of Illinois at Chicago. This hour long program is organized in conjunction with the UIC MFA Thesis Exhibitions, Now & There and A Nameless Familiar, at Gallery 400.

We are excited to welcome works by guest filmmakers and UIC alum Mary Helena Clark, Mike Gibisser, and Zachary Hutchinson.

Digital projection, ~51 mins, FREE

Co-organized by Tamara Becerra Valdez and Danny Carroll.
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Artist Bios:

Leticia Bernaus
The work of Leticia Bernaus (b. Argentina) displays an intriguing take on the conflicting contemporary link between nature and culture. She superimposes materials and formats, fading the boundaries between animal and mineral, industry and culture, documentary and fiction. Bernaus works with moving image, performance, photography, and writing in order to explore contemporary issues of displacement and belonging, diversity, and forms of colonialism. Her work has been exhibited internationally in Argentina, Brazil, United States, Spain, England, and Italy. She lives and works in Chicago (IL).

Danny Carroll
Danny lives and works in Chicago. His work focuses on nuances of care and desire, and how they exist in the everyday. Danny holds a BFA in visual arts from the New School and is currently finishing his Master’s degree in Moving Image at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has also completed residencies at Lazuli and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Mary Helena Clark
Mary Helena Clark is an artist working in film, video, and installation. Her work uses the language of collage, often bringing together disparate subjects and styles that suggest an exterior logic or code, to explore dissociative states through cinema. Working with quotation, the materiality of film, and incongruous sound/image relationships, Clark’s recent work explores shifting subjectivities and the limits of the embodied camera. Her films, such as After Writing (2008), And the sun flowers (2009), Sound Over Water (2009), By foot-candle light (2011), The Plant (2012), Orpheus (outtakes) (2012) and The Dragon is the Frame (2014), have been screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), Anthology Film Archives (New York), Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), National Gallery of Art (Washington DC), and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, among others.

Kylee Renee Clark
Kylie Renee Clark draws from her own process of growing up to feed her filmmaking practice, exploring the pain, joy, loneliness, and uncertainty that is born from the act of human development. Mixing mainstream filmmaking with a reflective sensibility, Clark’s films exist as investigations of her experiences in the world. Her work often finds itself toeing a line: between Mexican and White, child and adult, sadness and gratification. Clark’s peregrination into her own lived past and imagined future gives her a tenuous connection to the present, lending a dream-like quality to her films.

Mike Gibisser
Mike Gibisser is a filmmaker and artist interested in navigating the indefinite lines between essay, narrative, experimental, and documentary work, often drawing together disparate subjects or time periods. He has presented work at numerous galleries and festivals around the world, including the International Oberhausen Film Festival, the Harvard Film Archive, Tony Wight Gallery, Block Cinema, the AFI Film Festival, the Images Film Festival, Sundance, the European Media Arts Festival, threewalls gallery, and Views from the Avant Garde in the New York Film Festival. His work has been featured in Artforum, Variety, and Cinemascope, amongst other publications.

Zachary Hutchinson
Zachary Hutchinson (b. 1991) comes to art through costume making, theater, video making and an obsessive attention to image and transgressive affect. Hutchinson’s work uses queerness as resistance to capitalism through toys and fashion. Hutchinson received a BFA from SAIC and a MFA at UIC. They have shown work in Montreal, Mexico City, San Francisco CA, NYC, Los Angeles, Portland OR, Austin TX, Berlin Germany, Athens Greece, Glasgow United Kingdom, Iceland, Venice, and extensively in Chicago IL.

Tamara Becerra Valdez
Tamara Becerra Valdez uses video, printmaking, photography, and installation alongside an adoption of methods in archaeology, ethnography, and archives to reconsider overlooked historical topographies found in traces and fragments in the urban social landscape. The ephemeral nature of human behavior leaves an impression in her work. Valdez earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art and Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin in 2008. She is currently completing her Master’s degree in Moving Image at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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Tags: Chicago, Danny Carroll, FilmFront, Kylie Renee Clark, Leticia Bernaus, Lower West Side, Tamara Becerra Valdez, UIC MFA Thesis Screening