Chaperone with k8 Hardy

Freak Orlando, Ulrike Ottinger Filmproduction, 1981

Wednesday, July 15th, 7 pm

Freak Orlando

(Ulrike Ottinger ,1981)

EFA Project Space presents Chaperone, a weekly screening series consisting of films handpicked by a group of artists, all whose work provocatively explores disparate aspects of our culture’s love affair with mediated reality.

EFA Project Space welcomes the artist k8 Hardy, as she chaperones the film, Freak Orlando (1981):

“When I first watched Freak Orlando, directed by Ulrike Ottinger, I felt an urgent sense of connection with the film and her aesthetic, despite it being 20 years old. It blew my sense of time, political progress, and modern concerns wide open. The film was shockingly similar in its political and sexual politics to mine, and even more precisely, in a specific queer aesthetic that I thought had developed in the US Northwest in the mid-‘90s. It was like a surprise piece in a cultural puzzle that I had completed and boxed up. That box did not exist. The device of Ottinger’s film, a time-traveling liberated polysexual, is based on Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando. However, in Woolf’s novel, the safety of the bourgeoisie enables Orlando’s transformations and sexual deviance to be unthreatening and eccentric. On the other hand, Ottinger’s film unabashedly and unapologetically displays multitudes of sexual deviants with no prospect of normalcy. What I love about the film is that it doesn’t attempt to normalize or make the audience feel comfortable with these societal outcasts, but rather to display the pleasures of their queer freak lives. Furthermore, Ottinger gives no credence to reality or chronology, but rather has fantasy guide the locations of the film. In Freak Orlando, I really connected with the shameless portrayal of sexual and physical freaks and Ottinger’s lack of a need to justify or explain her characters. She reifies the notion that freaks do exist, and that they do not need to be contextualized or normalized. It’s a political sentiment that disturbs our current ideology of identities — that we are all the same and unique at once. Moreover, I was exhilarated to see a feminist legacy that did not righteously reject an indulgence in excess and the aesthetics of representation.”

Image courtesy the artist, k8 Hardy

K8 Hardy is a video and performance artist, political activist, and eccentric fashion stylist. A real Grrrl, she co-founded the queer and feminist art journal LTTR with Ulrike Müller, Emily Roysdon, and Ginger Brooks Takashi. Determined to challenge the mass media’s obliviousness to queer issues and alternative political action, she is set on the task of the abstract expression of sexual politics. One of her most famous pieces, a collaboration with Wynne Greenwood called New Report, was performed at the Tate Modern in 2007. Hardy’s work has shown in several group exhibitions domestically and abroad, recently including Reflections on the Electric Mirror: New Feminist Video at the Brookyn Museum (2009); Manifesto Marathon at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2008); The Way We Rhyme at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2008); Media Burn at the Tate Modern (2007); Uncertain States of America at the Moscow Biennial (2007); and Exile of the Imaginary at the Generali Foundation, Vienna (2007). She currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

EFA Project Space is located at 323 West 39 Street, 2nd Floor.

The Chaperone program has been organized by Ian Cooper, artist, and Michelle Levy, Program Director, EFA Project Space.

Sponsorship provided by

For more information on the event, contact projectspace@efanyc.org, or 212-563-5855 x 151

Chaperone with Amy Granat

Venom and Eternity, Copyright Jean Isidore Isou, 1951

Wednesday, July 8th, 7 pm

Venom and Eternity

(Jean Isidore Isou, 1951)

EFA Project Space presents Chaperone, a weekly screening series consisting of films handpicked by a group of artists, all whose work provocatively explores disparate aspects of our culture’s love affair with mediated reality.

EFA Project Space welcomes the artist Amy Granat, as she chaperones the film, Venom and Eternity (1951):

“Jean Isidore Isou (born I. Goldstein in 1925, in Botosani, Romania) was a writer of many published works, including short stories, novels, poetry and essays. He was also a founder of the Lettrist Movement. Isou wrote, directed, photographed, composed the music for, and acted in Venom and Eternity. In the film, which Isou refers to as a “revolt against cinema,” he attempts to discuss what was wrong with the cinema, and then goes on to show examples of what he thinks the cinema should consist of. Stan Brakhage, who viewed this film many, many times and used it in his classroom, describes Venom as “an extremely formal work, an extremely fine, balanced work.” Whether or not this film represents artistic expression will have to be the individual decision of each viewer. In the words of Jean Cocteau, “Is Venom a springboard or is it a void?  In 50 years we’ll know the answer. After all, remember how Wagner was received. Today, no one objects to his outbursts. The day will come, perhaps, when Isou’s style will be the fashion. Who can tell?”  When Venom and Eternity was first shown at the Cannes Film Festiva,l it caused a riot requiring fire hoses to be brought in. The film had its American premiere at Frank Stauffacher’s Art in Cinema at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and again caused a disturbance and a stomp-out. Brakhage and several other artists, including Robert Duncan, were at the premiere, and were outraged to learn that a Roman Catholic priest had been brought in to warn the audience of French decadence. According to Isou, “A film alone cannot assay the value of a system which embraces thousands of possibilities. In this work, I was more excited about the schism of image than about satisfying the demands of convention.”

Image courtesy the artist, Amy Granat, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich

Amy Granat’s work combines film, sound, performance, photography, and installation with distinctly poetic and formal juxtapositions. Drawing inspiration from early cinema, noise music, abstract painting, and beat literature, she embraces the culture of the past avant garde, reflecting and informing its future. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and received her BA from Bard College in 1994. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at P.S.1 Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Eva Presenhuber Galerie, Zurich; Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers’ and Basis Art Center, Frankfurt. She has been featured in such recent group exhibitions as Stray Alchemist at UCCA, Beijing; Strange Magic at Luhring Augistine, New York; Bastard Ceature at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and Born to Be Wild at Kunstmuseum, St.Gallen. She will show a new feature film at a solo exhibition at The Kitchen in New York City in January 2010. Granat lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

EFA Project Space is located at 323 West 39 Street, 2nd Floor.

The Chaperone program has been organized by Ian Cooper, artist, and Michelle Levy, Program Director, EFA Project Space.

Sponsorship provided by

For more information on the event, contact projectspace@efanyc.org, or 212-563-5855 x 151

Chaperone with Ian Cooper

Scream 3, Miramax Films, 2000

Wednesday, July 1st, 7 pm

SCREAM 3

(Wes Craven, 2000)

EFA Project Space presents Chaperone, a weekly screening series consisting of films handpicked by a group of artists, all whose work provocatively explores disparate aspects of our culture’s love affair with mediated reality.

EFA Project Space welcomes the artist Ian Cooper, as he chaperones the movie SCREAM 3:“…Scream 3, the final portion of the cult meta-trilogy takes place in Hollywood, on the set of a film-within-the-film, titled Stab 3, which is, itself, the final installment in a series begun by chronicling the horrific events depicted in the first Scream film. The sheer intellectual titillation of watching actors portray characters interacting with other actors playing characters, who are themselves actors portraying characters based on the others’ characters, supersedes everything.  In one memorable scene, the tireless heroine, Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) finds herself being chased through a set accurately recreating her childhood home — and how does the audience know that it’s so perfectly reconstructed? Because we recognize it from Scream, of course. The character relies on her memory of a space she’s intimately familiar with, in efforts to navigate cleverly and evade the killer. However, this structure’s true nature as an incomplete theatrical set, not a home, creates some truly uncanny post-postmodern stumbling blocks. Sidney’s extraordinary circumstances in this scene remind me of certain jarring, uncanny moments from my youth - the sensation of being caught in the near-perfect chasm between fiction and reality.”     

Image courtesy  Ian Cooper

By extracting and reconfiguring set pieces from coming-of-age films and television programs, Ian Cooper’s work explores themes, such as isolation and longing, central to the tropes of media-constructed adolescence. Recent work focuses on architectural elements from these fictional sources that directly enunciate their own function, specifically declarations of “vacancy” or “absence,” as pertaining to the presence, or housing, of the human figure. Cooper has had solo projects at Sandroni.Rey, Los Angeles, and has shown abroad at various institutions and galleries, including the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich; Annarumma 404, Naples; and Nice & Fit, Berlin. Cooper’s recent print project published by Forth Estate, shown late last year at EFA Project Space, was recently accessioned by The Whitney Museum of American Art for its permanent collection. Cooper was born and raised in Manhattan. He is on the sculpture faculty at New York University, and currently lives and works in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

 EFA Project Space is located at 323 West 39 Street, 2nd Floor.

The Chaperone program has been organized by Ian Cooper, artist, and Michelle Levy, Program Director, EFA Project Space.

Sponsorship provided by  

For more information on the event, contact projectspace@efanyc.org, or 212-563-5855 x 151

Chaperone with Anna Craycroft

The Century of the Self, Copyright BBC Four, 2002

Wednesday, June 24, 7 p.m.

The Century of the Self (episodes 1 & 3)

(Adam Curtis, 2002)

EFA Project Space presents Chaperone, a weekly screening series consisting of films handpicked by a group of artists, all whose work provocatively explores disparate aspects of our culture’s love affair with mediated reality.

EFA Project Space welcomes the artist Anna Craycroft, as she chaperones the documentary, The Century of the Self (2002), Adam Curtis’ examinaton of the rise of the all-consuming self against the backdrop of the Freud dynasty. Anna will be sharing episodes 1 and 3 of this acclaimed 5 part series:

“For me, making art is an opportunity to continue to indulge my ruminations (ongoing from childhood, and sometimes still embedded there) on the distinction between self and others, and to consider how the great contemporary narratives by which we recognize the construction of individuality are often as much a hoax as they are true. It is encouraging to watch director Adam Curtis present these broad questions as tenets of American history. The Century of the Self is as persuasive and as entertaining as the theories it unravels.”

Image courtesy the artist, Anna Craycroft,
and Tracy Williams Ltd., New York

Anna Craycroft works in a wide range of media on research-based projects that explore how specific cultural constructs shape our social selves. Craycroft’s ongoing project Agency of the Orphan, an in-depth investigation of this culturally invented and psychologically manipulated archetype, yielded an expansive solo exhibition at Tracy Williams, LTD, with an accompanying publication in the spring of 2008. She has shown her work in public art projects, and solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe, including such locations, institutions, and galleries as P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Art in General, New York; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; Sandroni.Rey, Los Angeles; Le Case d’Arte, Milan; Socrates Sculpture Park, New York; and a public installation in The Hague. Craycroft is represented by Tracy Williams Ltd. in New York City, where she lives and works.

EFA Project Space is located at 323 West 39 Street, 2nd Floor.

The Chaperone program has been organized by Ian Cooper, artist, and Michelle Levy, Program Director, EFA Project Space.

Sponsorship provided by 

For more information on the event, contact projectspace@efanyc.org, or 212-563-5855 x 151

Chaperone with Alex Bag

Grandma’s Boy, Copyright 20th Century Fox, 2006

THURSDAY, June 18, 7pm

Grandma’s Boy

(2006, Nicholaus Goossen)

EFA Project Space presents Chaperone, an eight-week summer event. This weekly series consists of films handpicked by a group of artists, all whose work provocatively explores disparate aspects of our culture’s love affair with mediated reality.

EFA Project Space welcomes the artist Alex Bag, as she chaperones the movie, Grandma’s Boy (2006).

Alex (Allen Covert), a 35 year old video game tester has to find a new place to live when his roommate (Jonathan Loughran) spends the rent money on Filipino hookers. After an “encounter” with his friend’s (Nick Swardson) mom, Alex is forced to move in with his grandmother and her two roommates (Doris Roberts, Shirley Jones and Shirley Knight). In an attempt to save face with his younger co-workers, Alex says that he is living “with three hot babes.”

Courtesy the artist, Alex Bag, and Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York

Alex Bag’s work combines performance, video, acting, drawing, and installation with distinct humor and an acerbic wit to explore the particular ills and alienations endemic to late capitalist society. Drawing inspiration from mass media sources—particularly television—she simultaneously lambastes and embraces the culture her work reflects and informs. She was born in New York, where she currently resides and works, and received her BFA from Cooper Union in 1991. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York; Locust Projects, Miami; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; American Fine Arts, New York; and Emi Fontana Gallery, Milan. She has been featured in such recent exhibitions as Playback, ARC / Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris; Fit to Print and Beneath the Underdog, Gagosian Gallery, New York; Panorámica, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; and the Baltic Triennale, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania. A monograph on her work is forthcoming. She is represented by Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York.

EFA Project Space is located at 323 West 39 Street, 2nd Floor.

The Chaperone program has been organized by Ian Cooper and Michelle Levy.

For more information on the event, contact projectspace@efanyc.org, or 212-563-5855 x 151

Sponsorship provided by