New Video Premiering - March 3 - Solar Arts Building

Beneath the Skin, 2016

Beneath the Skin explores the ongoing tenderness I feel towards the loss of my mother. It gets to the heart of my grief by exploring how my deepest memories lay beneath my skin. They flow in waves, appear distorted and can take over my mind when I am least expecting it. It premieres this Thursday, March 3 at the Solar Arts Building in Northeast Minneapolis.
 
My approach to making this work and assembling my images is directly inspired by Hélène Cixous' l'ecriture feminine, a creative process which proposes a female form of writing that asks women to write from their bodies. This practice aims to transform how we tell and relate to stories. I think this method drops the "estrogen bomb" on filmmaking and film-writing, which in form and practice is dominated by white men and masculine, misogynistic thinking. 
 
I write my films from my body, because it is reaffirming and acts as an antithesis to defined ways of filmmaking. 
 
"I'll give you your body and you'll give me mine. But who are the men who give women the body that women blindly yield to them? Why so few texts? Because so few women have as yet won back their body. Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reverse-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word 'silence', the one that, aiming for the impossible, stops short before the word 'impossible' and writes it as 'the end.'
 
“Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard.
 
“And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great-that is for "great men"; and it's "silly."
 
― Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa
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​More info on event:

ESTROGEN: A LOVE STORY OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB

Local female artists do their interpretation of “Dropping the Estrogen Bomb” by the Guerrilla Girls.  Live music, painting, installation, fun radical thought provoking shenanigans.
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Guerrilla Girls Take Over Satellite event

MARCH 3 @ 5:00 pM - 9:00 PMSolar Arts Building
711 NE 15th Ave, 2nd Floor 
Minneapolis, MN 55413 United States+ Google Map

Free and open to the public

The Players in no particular order:

Paula Cisewski is the author of poetry collections Upon Arrival, Ghost Fargo (selected by Franz Wright for the Nightboat Poetry Prize), and The Threatened Everything, forthcoming later this year through Burnside Review Books. She has been awarded fellowships from the Banfill-Locke Center for the arts, the Jerome Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. Misplaced Sinister, her first collection of mostly prose, recently appeared through Red Bird Chapbooks.

Medicinall has been seen sporting paint brushes, scissors, turntables, drum machines, sewing machines and any other tool, that one can imagine. She has performed in many clubs and dark warehouses through the years. House music is her mistress and vinyl collecting is her addiction. She also loves working in multimedia and snuggling with kittens.

DJ Miss Elaine Eos has been monkeying around with sound arts since before she wore a bra. Vocalist, hand drummer and DJ, she comes at music from all angles. Her "miscellaneous" DJ style lends itself well to ambient chill rooms and long pirate radio sets, but she can also rock a dancefloor with deep, sexy, house music.

Jameen Lauck will be showing a few pieces of her drawing medium. Back in the day, she was a full blown Techno Goddess, but now she throws her energy at the theatre. When she is not on stage acting out her angst with Green Tea Productions, she is hanging out at Old Gem Theatre and bouncing her grandchild around town.

Jes Reyes is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and arts administrator. Recent photography and film/video art of hers has exhibited with Artists in Storefronts, Altered Esthetics, Made Here, and the Walker Art Center. For this event, Jes presents a new silent video that explores what is beneath the skin. 

Katie Palmer
Susan Opitz
Christi Furnas

Shannon Crabtree is a sassy photographer with a gift for lighting. She will be photodocumenting the shenanigans.


Guerrilla Girls Twin Cities Takeover is a celebration of the Guerrilla Girls’ 30th anniversary as an activist art collective.

The first project of its kind for the Guerrilla Girls and the largest arts collaboration of Twin Cities organizations to date, the Guerrilla Girls Twin Cities Takeover aims to inspire individual and collective activism by inviting the artist group to create new artwork and connect with the Twin Cities through youth engagement and community-wide events. 

The public moments of the project launched in January 2016. "Estrogen: A Love Story or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" is only one facet of the Guerrilla Girls Twin Cities Takeover—a multisite, citywide festival— for one week in February and March 2016
http://www.ggtakeover.com/ for all the info