Screening Friday, December 3, 8pm.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year!
For being asocial on social media, that is.
But also for being social around the warm glow of a projector beam.
With us!
Come celebrate the “reason” for the “season” (and by that, we mean “video art” and “winter break”) with a bunch of promising young artists from the Expanded Media Program in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University.
Come to the exhibition opening at our Main Street location beginning at 6pm. Then head over to the Masur Gallery at 8pm and settle in for the show.
See you there! (Put yer phone down!)
Presented in collaboration with Experimental Response Cinema.
Spellerberg Projects, Masur Gallery
119 W San Antonio St, Lockhart TX
Screening Fri Jan 3, 7pm
Curated by Jennifer Moore
Eric Acuña is a San Antonio based artist and gallery preparator at Texas State University. His work explores diverse subjects through painting, videography, performance, archives, and objects. He is currently working towards a BFA in Expanded Media from Texas State University with a focus on experimental filmmaking.
He is the artist-in-residence at The Museum of Human Achievement, where his interest in bioacoustics embeds local environmental systems into musical and performance structures using new technologies to collect data from nature between Austin and San Antonio. Going beyond direct sonification, he develops a syntax based on the recorded natural processes, which may be audio documented from physical movements, water, and wind, etc. to create dialogue around collective actions, innovative musical creations, and ecological awareness.
Sam Foster grew up in Lawrence, KS and graduated with a BFA from Milwaukee institute of Art and Design in painting and studio art (2012). Sam works and lives in Austin, TX, and creates paintings and video art inspired by his life experiences. His paintings incorporate garish oils and collaged elements. Similarly his videos combine personal and found footage. About these works, he says:
“These videos are sourced from my relationships with different types of men, the ‘other’ or ‘downtrodden’ characters. My experiences working in the recovery community and losing my father at a young age to mental illness have inspired me to examine the myth of what it means to be ‘a good man.’ Peers and friends suffering or overcoming drug addiction and criminal behavior are documented and interviewed. My goal is not to exploit but to create a lens through experimental film to pose questions about growing and overcoming major life difficulties that exist within often unseen communities.”
Spellerberg Projects, Masur Gallery
119 W San Antonio St, Lockhart TX
Oct 20, 2018, 8pm
Free
Statement by curators Noor Ale and Claudia Mattos:
All is well on the border presents a collection of video works that contend with life on the margins. The program takes its name from the same-titled 1997 Akram Zaatari documentary, which offers for wide viewing the testimonies of three prisoners held in detention centers during the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon. These gathered works align histories, accounts and experiences surrounding immigration, exile, statelessness, and the precarity of moving across sovereign borders, as well as the fringes of social and cultural boundaries. These liminal zones have come to increasing prominence on the back of refugee crises stemming from Afghanistan, Somalia and Syria, and activist platforms that have granted greater visibility to those in the periphery. And as the Internet and its digital effects have staked greater claims in the lives of people globally; and facilitated communication and the bridging of experiences beyond arbitrary boundaries; borders, too, have grown increasingly irrelevant in our highly interconnected and global communities.
In these times of heightened national security, mass globalization, civic unrest and the rise of nationalist movements throughout the West, borders are both foregrounded and swept aside; highly policed or easily crossed; and used to reinforce geopolitical agendas and causes. All it well on the border is in many ways a case study of border states across diverse cross-sections of global society, offering a nuanced picture of the myriad lines that divide our world.
Program:
Akram Zaatari, All Is Well On the Border, 1997, 43:00
A critique of the political slogans which usually dominate the image of the shrit, or the occupied frontal zone in South Lebanon.
Mieke Bal and Shahram Entekhabi, Lost In Space, 2015, 17:00
The film about homelessness and displacement tears apart the different manifestations of language.
Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Declaration of Poetic Disobedience, 2005, 15:15
“In November of 2003 I began to write this text. It was my clumsy attempt at finding a post-9/11 pice and place in another map — an imaginary one drafted by me.” (G G-P)
Mona Hatoum, Measures of Distance, 1998, 15:25
This early work is concerned with the artist’s separation from her Palestinian family and, in particular, her relationship with her mother whose letters from Beirut are read aloud as the soundtrack to the tape.
Julia Meltzer and David Thorne, Not a matter of if but when…, 2007, 17:40
Developed with Rami Farah in 2005-06 in Damacus, when momentous events reverberated throughout Syria giving rise to widespread anxiety and anticipation around the potential for imminent change, regime change, internal reform, internal collapse, civil war and the increased power of fundamentalist Islam.
RUN LIKE THE DEVIL, produced by Richelle Fatheree and directed by award-winning Austin-based director Steve Mims, documents the 2018 US Senate race between Ted Cruz and Beto O’Rourke. A non-partisan deep dive that goes beyond the political campaigns, the film threads the stories of the candidates with those of their respective political parties during a historic period of national political tumult.
Participants include O’Rourke, Cruz, Evan Smith (CEO, Texas Tribune), Mark McKinnon (political consultant), David Richards (Ann Richard’s ex-husband and redistricting litigator), Bob Moore (former editor, El Paso Times), Joshua Houston (Texas Impact Attorney) and others. Run time: 59 minutes.
Spellerberg Projects, Masur Gallery
119 W San Antonio St, Lockhart TX
Oct 5, 2018, 8pm
$10 suggested donation at the door
Film’s website
Statement by director Steve Mims:
In August of 2010 I was working on a documentary that found me out in front of the Texas capitol filming a Tea Party rally that focused on denouncing Barack Obama. One of the speakers that day was Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz. I had never heard of him at the time and he was largely unknown statewide. In a fiery speech he fervently called for ending the Affordable Care Act and for defeating the president in 2012. The event (which is included in this current documentary) made a huge impression on me. By 2012 Cruz had become a Tea Party hero. He surprised pundits when he toppled a mainstream Republican to win the nomination to run for U.S. Senate. Then he buried his Democratic opponent in a landslide victory in the general election.
I felt then that the election had unfolded with little examination of both Cruz and opponent Paul Saddler on film and in television.
When I picked up a copy of the Austin American Statesman in late 2016 and read that U.S. Representative Beto O’Rourke of El Paso was considering a run for Cruz’s senate seat I took an interest. On March 31, 2017 I traveled to El Paso to film his campaign announcement. Off and on from that day until as late as August 2, 2018 I filmed and edited material for the film that has become RUN LIKE THE DEVIL.
The film is an honest effort to make a non-partisan film about the two candidates, their personal stories, their beliefs, their respective parties and some of the most controversial issues in the campaign. The film is independently funded. An ambitious Kickstarter campaign failed, but enough people donated to our project via a fiscal sponsorship through the Austin Film Society that we were able to cover most expenses for making the film. I work as a part-time Lecturer in film at UT Austin and as a freelance writer/director/cinematographer. I have my own gear and I also edit. My hours shooting and editing on this film are donated to the film as a civic commitment on my part and is also a reflection of my love of doing the job of work that is making a film.
Crucial in this effort is producer Richelle Fatheree. Early on we had help from Austin attorney Reid Nelson.
Like all projects, the very best part of the process is going to places you’d otherwise never go and meeting people you would never meet. Meeting Beto and his family was a true pleasure, as was getting to pick the brains of everyone else who was generous enough to make time for an interview. Ted Cruz’s staff kindly worked with us to schedule an interview where he answered all our questions without clearing them in advance.
In the end I think the film is as honest a portrait of the two candidates as I can make. There is much in the film that will be uneasy for partisans and which will anger some people. I think there is real utility in that and I hope it fosters frank discussions that otherwise might not happen.
A project of the San Marcos Cinema Club, 25 Miles Damn is comprised of one-minute-long, non-fiction submissions filmed somewhere within 25 miles of San Marcos, aiming to highlight our region’s unique subcultures and geographic diversity. We hope to engage filmmakers in Lockhart, Luling, Seguin, Wimberley, Kyle, New Braunfels, San Marcos, and others. More info to come.
Spellerberg Projects, Masur Gallery
119 W San Antonio St, Lockhart TX
7pm
Curated by Sam Cotter and Fraser McCallum, for Vtape.
“The works herein are characterized by broad sensitivities to land and place, formed by past and present migrations of living things, ideas and commodities. Informed by de-colonial and postcolonial theory, anti-imperialist struggles and critiques of urbanism, water is the medium through which ideas are made to flow, erode and surge forth.”
Chaparral Coffee
106 E Market St, Lockhart TX
9pm
Spellerberg Projects, Masur Gallery
119 W San Antonio St, Lockhart TX
Feb 13 2018, 8pm
Experimental Response Cinema
Metaphors on Vision: Films by Menken and Brakhage
Experimental Response Cinema and Spellerberg Projects present an evening in celebration of the life and work of experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. This event includes a program of 16mm films by Marie Menken, who was a major influence on Brakhage early in his career, and two later Brakhage works, one of which is on 35mm.
Menken films include: Notebook (1963), Go Go Go (1964), Glimpse of the Garden (1957), and Dwightiana (1959). Brakhage films include Interpolations 1-5 (1992, 35mm), and one additional 16mm film. Total running time is approximately one hour.
This series is presented in conjunction with the republication of Brakhage’s 1963 book Metaphors of Vision, which has been out of print for 40 years. Copies of the book are available for purchase at the screening. The program is introduced by Light Industry’s Thomas Beard.
Presented in collaboration with Experimental Response Cinema.
A program of short videos by artist Guy Woueté, examining migration and displacement, borders and non-places.
Opening with a special screening event at Chaparral Coffee Saturday August 12 2017, 8pm. The program will then be on view by appointment at Spellerberg Projects August 13–September 16 2017.
Guy Woueté divides his time between Antwerp and Douala. Born in Douala in 1980, he holds a Master of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Fine Arts from Erg school of Arts in Brussels, and from the University of Paris 8. He has completed post-academic study at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. A video artist, sculptor and painter who also embraces installations and photography, Woueté creates his images following a conceptual artistic approach similar to that of a reporter, albeit leaving behind the reporter’s obligation to refer to familiar images. He confronts the paradox that as an artist he materializes and represents things that can only be experienced as contradictions and transitional situations. Guy Woueté’s oeuvre always encompasses elements of social criticism and the questions of migration in the age of globalization; everyday life realities are his source of inspiration.
Works being screened: Next week, 2010; D’ici là, 2015;
Volcano, 2008;
Echo Between, 2009;
After Walls, 2009;
La liste est longue, 2006–7;
Burka… (No, you have to ask the questions…), 2013;
Ouidah Return, 2007.
The presentation of this work by Spellerberg Projects is made possible though a partnership with Vtape, Toronto. The program was curated for Vtape by Pierre Beaudoin.