Cellular Cinema 17: THE SHAPE OF ARTIFACT: films by Ben Balcom & Sky Hopinka

Cellular Cinema is an organically evolving, ongoing screening series of experimental film, video and performance. As far as we know it’s the only regularly occurring event in Minneapolis or St. Paul that features short form, experimental contemporary moving image art.

The Cellular Cinema community is dedicated to the idea that moving image art can be a realm of exploration, improvisation and play on a small scale, using a wide range of tools, techniques and technologies, unbound by the commercial considerations of mainstream narrative media.

We have the capacity to screen work on 16mm, super-8, sometimes with multiple projectors, sometimes including live sound or performance accompaniment, as well as HD and SD video.

Beginning in October 2014, the Cellular Cinema community has welcomed guest curators from across the country and has featured work of numerous nationally renowned and local artists.

October:

The earth does not yield discrete images for any thing but the human who looks out upon it with a mind inclined towards understanding, towards words. Language begins in the absurd and evolves into a system of meaning. When looking at the world we rely on small tools of sight to carve and to shape simple mysteries. The moving images of Sky Hopinka and Ben Balcom explore the possibilities of expanded recognitions of the material world. Both artists are devoted to the word and the world in a way that seeks understanding of how nature and language have been subdued by ideology and artifact.

Sky Hopinka is a Ho-Chunk Nation national and descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians.  His work centers around personal positions of homeland and landscape, designs of language and facets of culture contained within, and the play between the accessibility of the known and the unknowable. 

Ben Balcom was born in Massachusetts and raised in Illinois. He teaches film production at UWM and is the technical director for the Milwaukee Film Festival. He is also a co-founder and programmer of Microlights Cinema. Using visual and linguistic abstractions, his films explore  and embrace the essential messiness of subjectivity.