Why Sing When Nobody Hears? Films by Mary Billyou

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Microscope welcomes Brooklyn-based artist and filmmaker Mary Billyou back to the gallery for Why Sing When Nobody Hears?, a screening of films and videos including the New York premieres of her latest GUN, HAT, GIRL, SCREAM (2016, 16mm, 12 min) and Demonstration (16mm transferred to digital video, 4 min).

Poetic, social, or political, Billyou’s works present a range of subject matter combined with a sensibility for and understanding of the varied moving image formats employed in each work.

Her new video Demonstration utilizes footage from a found 16mm instructional film on self-defense, slowed and dramatically looped, to form an unexpected choreography between attacker and victim. In GUN, HAT, GIRL, SCREAM black & white film both found and shot by the artist is used to created the look and atmosphere of film noir in a work consisting of four 100 foot films, played in an order determined by the projectionist at the time of screening.

The lo-fi aesthetic and texture of toy Pixelvision video underlines the punk attitude behind the bold distorted tunes of “the best band to last an entire afternoon”, featuring Rebecca Gaffney, Vanessa Reis, and Billyou herself in her 1995 Baby Girl Jesus, shot in a loft above an Adams Morgan, DC bakery. Other works such as CBS Eye featuring a “rayogram” of the CBS logo,  Available Properties, addressing urban development, and her anti-war film/essay The Wonder of it All, in which a nine-year-old reads from Virginia Wolf to a sequence of press war photographs, finds the artist engaged with socio-economic issues – past and present.

The title of the night, Why Sing When Nobody Hears? is borrowed from Billyou’s paraphrasing of a letter by Emily Dickinson, referring to the singing of a bird in her garden that goes unnoticed, with a parallel to the condition of the artist. The bird responds: “My business is to sing”, and such seems Billyou’s.

Mary Billyou will be in attendance and available for a Q&A following the screening.

Mary Billyou is a practicing filmmaker whose work accesses cultural memory by directing attention to the limits of institutional frames. Editing found footage with original material, Billyou investigates the aporias of cinema’s structural forms. Re-ordering anonymous authoritative directives, the plastic qualities of media lead to further unresolved questions. Currently, she is writing a series of articles on minor cinema in NYC for The Brooklyn Rail. In January, her first films were acquired by the Getty Research Institute as part of the feminist counter-cinema Joanie4Jackie. Screenings include: Art in General, The New Museum, Participant Inc., Images Festival, Spectacle Theater, UnionDocs, Bard College, and Sundance Int’l Film Festival, among others. She has been awarded filmmaking grants from Outpost, NYSCA and the Jerome Foundation. Billyou received her MFA in Film, Video, and New Media from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and attended The Whitney Independent Study Program. Her work has been recognized in The New York Times, artforum.com, and Octopus Journal, among others.

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General admission $8
Members & Students w/ ID $6

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TICKETS

Venue: 

Microscope Gallery - New York, United States

Dates: 

Saturday, February 25, 2017 - 19:30

Category: 

Dates: 

Saturday, February 25, 2017 - 19:30
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