May 22 - June 22 2015

Cindy Sherman Bishop | Jennie Livingston | David Macke | Tim McCarthy | Jicky Schnee

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 23, 6-9 pm.

Cindy Sherman Bishop

A Doll's House V1.0 (Crying for the Moon)

“Each floor of the dollhouse represents my family of origin. I was lucky that both sets of grandparents shot film of my mother and father respectively through the 1940s and 50s. As you peer in through the windows, you’ll see the films my grandfathers’ took of family activities. On the bottom floor, my dad appears as a quiet shy boy with a sweet smile and a habit of walking exactly the same way he does today. That shy boy grew into a Harvard-educated lawyer who was brilliant in some ways, but terrible in others, especially with parenting and money. The floorplan drawn on the bottom floor is that of the house I grew up in Atlanta. My dad and granddad laid the flagstone patio you see there. The large rug in the middle is the Oriental rug that had to be repossessed because my dad refused to pay the remaining balance. His large armchair in the den is represented too - a red leather chair only he could sit in as the man of the house. I loved and hated him and his moods…. My grandmother had them as well. It is interesting how those ups-and-downs had such different effect on me and my siblings.

On the second floor plays the film of my mother’s childhood. She is one of six children born to well-educated, well-heeled parents and so it seemed fitting, though I would say I had a more foundational relationship with my mother, that her family gain the vaulted top floor. Though they had more means, this family also had its share of dysfunction. Still today I find myself thwarting commitment, fearing that whatever I choose may be beneath their imagined standards. The top floor has no floor plan, a blank canvas was the intent, except for a few notes. My mother told me that as a small child I would cry for the moon, when it proved unattainable I would cry even harder, inconsolable. She has always seemed to care less how her family felt about us than I did. It is tortuous to try to prove oneself worthy to people who have never and will never pay attention.

In keeping with these broken parts of all of us, the mirrored projections are fractured.

I built this house to experience it in physical reality. Going forward, I would like to invite those outside to come in and experience the viewpoint as “the other.” A virtual reality experience may be on the horizon.

This first installation at AMP posits a voyeuristic physical exploration of a 21st century female psyche embedded within a dollhouse. In this experience, the audience participation is limited to the outsider or voyeur, or what I would correlate to “the male gaze.” My future goal is to render the Dollhouse in virtual reality so that the audience could choose to remain outside looking in, or experience the dollhouse as the doll herself.”

Cindy Sherman Bishop is a visual artist, filmmaker, and digital creative. Originally a software developer and a painter, her work ranges from creating new tools for artistic expression to realizing immersive, interactive environments with full-body interaction. She received her MFA in Dynamic Media at Massachusetts College of Art in 2013, and is continuing to explore the intersection of art, video and technology at MIT with a fellowship at the Open Doc Lab @MITOpenDocLab, cindyshermanbishop.com

Jennie Livingston

Earth Camp One, Drawings + Photographs

Earth Camp One, Jennie Livingston’s work in progress, is a first-person memoir, a family saga, and a broad essay about how American culture views loss and impermanence. It’s about how the director lost 4 family members in 5 years, and it recalls a 1970s hippie summer camp, the connection being that when we’re young, we often want to break away from our families, find different cultural markers. What happens when they leave us? Earth Camp One uses first-person storytelling, humor, archival footage, interviews, animation, drawings, and thousands of photographs to explore how it is to live in a world where everything and everyone disappears.

There’s a paradox at the film’s center: we long for what and whom we’ve lost, but at the same time, we wish to forget, as rapidly as possible, what loss feels like.

In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit wrote, “before the 1960s, light and air themselves seem to have had an almost undersea depth and luminosity, in which skin glowed opalescently… most Americans who didn’t live through it think the Depression took place in a world of rough-hewn but secretly seductive black-and-white surfaces, as though texture itself could be a wealth to counter all that poverty.”

Images spark memories, some false, some accurate. Like historians, filmmakers obsessively consider the relationships between pictures and stories, conjuring strings of images to illuminate the chaos of living. Telling and seeing stories, we’re doing two things: unearthing emotional worlds, and looking for resonant images to help us understand. Stories turn what’s unquestionably stressful in real life (i.e. wondering what will happen next) into pleasure and order.

In the show are a few of the thousands of pictures (drawings and photographs) that will make up the stories of Earth Camp One.

Jennie Livingston is a filmmaker known for lively storytelling, nuanced character portraits, and thoughtful explorations of identity, class, race, death, sex, and gender. Livingston’s films include Paris is Burning, Who’s the Top?, and Through the Ice. Paris is Burning appeared on New York Magazine’s 40th anniversary approval matrix, their “deliberately oversimplified guide to 40 years in the cultural capital of the world” next to Annie Hall, Pauline Kael, and Do the Right Thing. The LA Times called Who’s the Top? “witty and accomplished.” Livingston is currently working on Earth Camp One, a memoir/essay feature film that’s been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, Netflix, Kickstarter backers, and by donors and foundations. Jennie’s most exciting work-for-hire was a video for Elton John’s ongoing stage show, The Million Dollar Piano. Livingston majored in Studio Art at Yale, where she won the Sudler Prize for drawings and photographs. She grew up in Los Angeles and lives in Brooklyn, NY. For more info please visit www.jennielivingston.com

David Macke

13 Chewing Gum

”If we were to see them in their glorified forms we would be tempted to bow down and worship them.” – C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

"Through photography and video my portraiture explores the iconography of performing manhood and the wild nature of boys becoming men. Some of our greatest cultural icons transcend standard male gender ideals, despite being outsiders with exaggerated expressions of the masculine. Considering David Bowie, Kurt Cobain, Mick Jagger, River Phoenix, Michael Jackson and Marlon Brando, James Dean, Billy Idol, John Wayne, who are glorified and have gained wide mass appeal. Such men steer society’s notions of masculinity and sexuality by establishing mythic identities that transcend ideas of normative male posturing - identity via performance art. As an artist I look for the creation of an American myth. Currently my focus is on the performative alchemy that conveys the glorification of the male in wildness and wilderness.”

David Macke was born in 1971, and studied Spanish literature at the Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain. For the last two years he has been making photographic and video portraiture of performative masculinity. Riverzine LA is in the collection of Whitney Museum of American Art. His exhibitions include: 2011 Queer Portraits VIHdeos, Madrid, Spain; Queerocracy Symposium, Parsons; The New School for Design, New York, NY; 2010 PhotoFeast, Milk Studios, New York, NY. Film credits include: “Big Al“ 2015 (director) and “Jeremy” 2014 (co-director). David is also the founder, artistic director and executive producer of {Your Name Here} A Queer Theater Company. {Your Name Here} is a non-profit theatre troupe and producing company. For further information: yournameherequeer.org and Facebook: yournamehereNYC

Tim McCarthy

To Queer Youth in 100 Years

“Before I died of AIDS, as part of my search for the meaning of being gay, I filmed life portraits with diverse LGBTI people to understand how their interpretation of being gay guided their lives. I always ended the portraits by asking, “What would you like to say to Queer Youth 100 years from now?”

Technology has allowed us to reinterpret many things in our world. This project is my reinterpretation of the painted portrait. The result provides an emotionally moving, as well as insightful look at our queer cultural evolution. While keeping true to each person’s original voice, I have edited the portraits down into mini documentaries that last several minutes. Some of the people documented here are: Urvashi Vaid, one of the prominent leaders of our movement since the 1980’s; Clyde Hall, a leader in the Native American tribal and legal communities all his life as an open gay man; and Marvin Liebman, a closeted gay man who helped found the modern conservative movement with William F. Buckley.”

Tim McCarthy is a Gay Video Historian. He has traveled the world since 1990 with a video camera documenting LGBTI life in 90 countries thus far and on all 7 continents. He is creating a visual record of this ‘time of firsts’ for LGBTI people around the globe. It is both his medicine and his legacy. He was with the first International Gay and Lesbian Delegation to the Soviet Union in 1991. He was ‘first report’ credentialed by the White House for Gay TV in 1993. His second film “Nocebo + Witchcraft” is about his trip bringing his HIV back to its homeland Uganda in 1999. He was on the first Gay Expedition to Antarctica in 2000. The film “How To Survive a Plague”, which uses some of his archival footage, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2013. Currently, he is working in Uganda on Voices of Abasiyazzi.com.

Jicky Schnee

Beyond This Line There Be Dragons

Beyond This Line There Be Dragons began with a childhood fascination with old maps in which the Earth was still conceived of as flat. Here a line was commonly drawn at the point where exploration had ended that said, 'Beyond This Place There Be Dragons'. In those days it was commonly believed that if you crossed this place, you might either fall off the earth into an unknown abyss or encounter some horrible unknown beast such as the dragon. I have always been intrigued by what lies over that line, physical and metaphysical, personal and universal, as the unknown holds the greatest possibilities. A quote from Rossiter Raymond that was sent to me many years ago has long endured in my mind, “Life is Eternal; And Love is Immortal; and Death is only a Horizon; and a Horizon is nothing save the limit of our Sight”; this horizon can be both a place we have not yet seen but also a place in which we refuse to look. The play written along with these works, “The Four Sisters; The Eye, the Ear, the Brain, and the Mouth” is an exploration into the themes of talent, beauty, nature, sustenance, distraction, futility, mortality, and hope. In it each sister comes to realize that their greatest strength can also be their undoing. Yet they must face the unknown and move forward against all odds to find their own truth and, ultimately, faith.

Jicky Schnee received her B.A. in Art and Art History from Rice University and studied drama at BADA in Oxford, England. She works as both a painter and actress. Her most notable roles as an actor have been a supporting role to Marion Cotillard in “The Immigrant” which premiered in NYC in April 2014, the lead role in “The Afterlight” also starring Rip Torn, and the title role in “Arabian Nights” at The Classic Stage Company in NY. She recently did a small part across from Peter Saarsgard in the yet to premiere film, “Experimenter.” Jicky will have her first solo art show this summer at the McDaris Gallery in Hudson, NY from June 27th to August 30th. Jicky lives and works between NYC and Woodstock, NY.

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