Doors open at 6PM, Screening at 6:30PM; $8 suggested donation

Vanessa Roveto, Excitability, 32 min., 2013

Michael Robinson, Light Is Waiting, 11 min., 2007

Michael Robinson, All Through The Night, 4.20 min., 2008

Michael Robinson, These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us, 13min., 2010

Michael Robinson, The Dark, Krystle, 9min., 2013

Queer pop cultures collide in the exciting video work of Vanessa Roveto and Michael Robinson. Collaging delusional gossip from freak encounters with lesbian icons, or queering popular iconography through mechanical manipulation, mashups or supercuts, this evening of recent video works leave nothing sacred, no text unturned.

Vanessa Roveto’s Excitability assembles the artist’s alleged encounters with paramours Kristen (“call me Kstew”) Stewart, Lindsay Lohan, Lilly Tomlin through homespun monologues. The hilarious recollections are thrown into question by the dystopic interstitial sequences or the artist struggling to adapt to a brutal consumerist culture.

Michael Robinson’s Light is Waiting reinvisions as a very special episode of television’s Full House that devours itself from the inside out, excavating a hypnotic nightmare of a culture lost at sea. Tropes of video art and family entertainment face off in a luminous orgy neither can survive. All Through the Night offers a charred visitation with an icy language of control: “there is no room for love”. Splinters of Nordic fairy tales and ecological disaster films are ground down into a prism of contradictions in this hopeful container for hopelessness. Tired of underworld and overworld alike, Isis (Elizabeth Taylor) escorts her favorite son (Michael Jackson) on their final curtain call down the Nile, leaving a neon wake of shattered tombs and sparkling sarcophagi, in These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us. The Dark, Krystle is supercut, comprised of footage from the 1980s soap, Dynasty. The cabin is on fire! Krystle can’t stop crying, Alexis won’t stop drinking, and the fabric of existence hangs in the balance, again and again and again.

VANESSA ROVETO is a writer and filmmaker. Her work has been screened at the Anthology Film Archives, Redcat and Lincoln Center, and her first book of poetry is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press. She holds an MFA from from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a poetry fellow.

MICHAEL ROBINSON (b.1981) is a film, video and collage artist whose work explores the joys and dangers of mediated experience, riding the fine lines between humor and terror, nostalgia and contempt, ecstasy and hysteria. His work has screened in both solo and group shows at a variety of festivals, museums, and galleries including The 2012 Whitney Biennial, The International Film Festival Rotterdam, The New York Film Festival, The Walker Art Center, MoMA P.S.1, The London Film Festival, REDCAT Los Angeles, among others. He was the recipient of a 2012 Creative Capital grant, a 2011-2012 Film/Video Residency Award from The Wexner Center for the Arts, a 2012 Kazuko Trust Award, a 2009 residency from The Headlands Center for the Arts, and his films have received awards from numerous festivals. Michael was featured as one of the “Best 50 Filmmakers Under 50” by Cinema Scope magazine in 2012, and listed as one of the top ten avant-garde filmmakers of the 2000’s by Film Comment magazine, and his work has been discussed in publications such as Frieze, Artforum, Art Papers, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Dazed and Confused, The Nation, BOMBlog, and The Brooklyn Rail. He has curated programs for San Francisco Cinematheque, Whitechapel Gallery, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Cornell Cinema, and The State Contemporary Art Center in Moscow, and served on the awards juries of The Ann Arbor Film Festival, The Aurora Festival, The Big Muddy Film Festival, and Migrating Forms. Michael holds a BFA from Ithaca College, an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and has taught at Binghamton University and UIC.