Come through for a night of powerful cinematic and personal exploration with an interplay of work from video artists Cecelia Condit and Kym McDaniel.  Through a selection of their short works, we will open up some of the common themes that thread through them from relief,  to empowerment, to reclamation, or voicing one’s own interior,  this program intends to ask how LOVE and VIOLENCE can be conflated and misconstrued.

After developing debilitating chronic pain from a dance injury, McDaniel created the multi-part Exit Strategies as a healing experiment, to Condit’s work within the psychological landscape of contemporary fairy tales, dreams and poetry that uncovers innate violence and lately is grappling with memory and the frailty of environmentally vulnerable worlds, we’ll reflect on the embedded feminism and their parsing of these questions and concerns in a dialogue following the program.

*Please Note* proof of vaccination is required for entry, as are masks for the duration of the program. We are located 400 feet from a testing location and recommend grabbing a quick and free rapid test before coming through.

After developing debilitating chronic pain from a dance injury, Exit Strategies were created as a healing experiment. Over the course of six films, the filmmaker questions the intersection between her stored body memories and physical illnesses. The works screen as both a linear sequence and nonlinear experimental vignettes, representative of the process spiral of trauma and recovery. By using images and voice as a reclamation of history and personal video diary, the filmmaker queers and rebuilds herself and her world in the aftermath of trauma.

Invoking a biblical story of life coming from dry bones, Condit constructs an experimental narrative about an older woman’s confrontation with her own mortality after the death of her mother. The bone represents the promise of youth and hope—a promise jealously coveted by the young, but needed more by those grown old. Inverting cultural values, Condit represents feminine youth as a mannequin, and seeks humanity in the form of the older woman, who is reborn by overcoming her fear of death.

Annie Lloyd is a daughter’s complex and poetic documentation of the last four years of her mother’s life and a portrayal of the creativity and wisdom of old age.

I’ve Been Afraid is about the fear of aggression and those paralyzing forces that allow the body to accept violence.

Since 1981, Condit’s videos have created heroines whose lives swing between beauty and the grotesque, innocence and cruelty, youth and fragility. Her work puts a subversive spin on the traditional mythology of women in film and the psychology of sexuality and violence. Exploring the dark side of female subjectivity, her “feminist fairy tales” focus on friendships, age, and the natural world. She has shown internationally in festivals, museums and alternative spaces, and is represented in collections including the Museum of Modern Art in NYC and Centre Georges Pompidou Musee National d’Art Moderne, Paris, France. She has received numerous film festival awards, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Film Institute, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Mary L. Nohl Foundation. She is a professor emerita in the Department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA., where she was the director of the graduate program in film for 30-years.

Kym McDaniel is an experimental filmmaker and choreographer. She began working in video after a traumatic head injury asked her to radicalize her practice. Her personal work uses image collages, text, gesture, and the body to explore chronic illness, queerness/disability, and structural dissociation. She is an AmSAT Alexander Technique teacher and has an MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.