Videopolis @ Metro Gallery

Videopolis 2009
May 8th-10th

Metro Gallery 1700 N Charles Street

In an effort to explore the tangible boundaries of the moving image, Videopolis showcases local fringe film and video work at the Metro Gallery, 1700 North Charles St. in Baltimore. The festival includes features, shorts, and live performances that manipulate the moving image, as well as video installations that will be available for viewing for a month. The festivities begin Friday, May 8th with music videos and performances by System D-128, DrewTube, Dubpixel and Bardot’s Gems From the Vault. Saturday, May 9th will feature “One Down”, comedy shorts and performances by Steve Strohmeier, Jana Hunter and Papercuts. Sunday, May 10th we’ll screen feature “Isle of the Damned”, documentary shorts, and close with a live performance of an original score to Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” by Adrian Bond and Joanne Juskus. All events are free except Saturday evening’s performances, for which there is a $7 cover. Please see below for a detailed schedule.

Friday May 8th

8:00 pm - Dubpixel Live VJ Set

9:00 pm - Music Videos

10:00 pm - Bardot’s Gems from the Film Vault

11:00 pm - Systen D-128 aka Duey FM Live VJ Set

12:30 pm - Drew TV YouTube Mixx

Saturday May 9th

12:30 pm - Partita: Mathew Bainbridge

2:00 pm - One Down: Brian Morrison

3:45 pm - Written World: Kevin Blackistone

5:00 pm - Comedy Shorts

Billy Dee
Unicorn, P.I.

Geoffrey Kixmiller /
Gideon Chase
Brand New Feelings

Mobtelevision
Death Takes a Holiday
Motel 6

Jason Dove
Klang Tour Journals,

James Hollenbaugh/ James Roden
Dec. 2666

Stephen DeCubellis /Jim Bianco
I Got a Thing for You

6:30 pm - Grab Bag Shorts

9:00 pm - LIVE SHOW $7 21 and Up
Papercuts, Jana Hunter, Steve Strohmeier
w/ Live VJ sets by Guy Werner and Joe Reinsel

Sunday May 10th

2:00 pm - Isle Of The Damned: DireWit Films

3:45 pm - Documentary Shorts

Morgan Showalter
NTSC

Jane Cottis
It’s a Lesbian World After All

Becka Dowding
Love, Mississippi

5:00 pm - Narrative Shorts

Katherine Boule/Glenn Nelson
Misplaced

Joel Haddock
Better View

6:00 pm - Experimental Shorts

Mike Bartolomeo
A Model for the Motion of a Spring

Emma Walters
Travelling Gnome

Brendan Sullivan
Monoliths

Suzzi Skripkina
The Garden

Suzzi Skripkina
Soundscape

Emily Slaughter
Arizona

Amy Mann
Hair

James Robert Brasic
Dream

Selina Loper
Dominoes

Eric Dyer
Copenhagen Cycles
Kinetic Sandwich

7:30 pm - “Metropolis” w/ Live music by: Adrian Bond and Joanne Juskus

10:30 pm - Grab Bag Shorts

Robing Hood Adventures @ The Zodiac

Sunday, May 10 and Tuesday, May 12
9 pm
Written by Tim Paggi
$2

Picture Plane @ Nudashank

Michael Dotson "Side by Side" Acrylic on Canvas

Picture Plane:

May 15 - June 19

Opening Reception: May 15, 7-9 pm

Nudashank is pleased to present our second exhibition- “Picture Plane.” This show brings together paintings that combine hard-edged abstraction with a post-digital return to pictorial space and linear perspective. Equal parts modernism and classicism, the exhibiting painters are from a generation that has been influenced by screensavers, vector graphics, MS Paint, Google maps, and Photoshop. The paintings evince the pervading luminescence of the computer screen, the digital color spectrum, and the expanding universe of virtual spaces. Flat, planar shapes are used as devices to depict scenes void of inhabitants. These paintings reflect a new, synthesized (perhaps alienated) perception of the world and how visual information is coded, condensed, flattened, and transmitted.

Picture Plane features six artists: New York based Dan Bina and Morgan Blair, DC based Michael Dotson and Allison Reimus, and Baltimore based Tim Horjus and Dale Ihnken.

Dan Bina’s interest is in the aperture, the framed images of the view finder and of printed ephemera. These abundant windows function to perforate our experience forming holes into parallel dimensions. His paintings originate in the discernment of a theorized theatrical space where a controlled whimsy of forms acts out particular roles.

Michael Dotson makes highly stylized landscapes that are a mix of memory and imagination. They are uninhabited and represent a place that is neither past nor future, but simply Other.

Allison Reimus' paintings utilize color and pattern as a vehicle to explore the psychology of the domestic interior. A recent graduate of American University's MFA program, Reimus' work addresses elements of the decorative through the use of graphic and painterly techniques.

Tim Horjus’ work evokes a contemporary reality by utilizing the language of modernism to discuss our reliance on digitally produced and transmitted information. The titles of his work are inspired by the anonymous subject lines of spam emails. His work is informed by active participation in these networks seen and unseen, pop-up ads, Target commercials, antiquated screen savers, hyperdrive, and power grids.

Dale Ihnken uses Islamic tile patterns and linear extrapolations to create paintings that reference mapping and circuitry. He attended Bradley University for undergrad and received his MFA from the Pratt Institute. Ihnken currently lives in Baltimore and has an active interest in Light Emitting Diodes.

Morgan Blair’s work aims to grasp and express the potency of specific feelings. In obsessively translating the weight of an emotion into flat fields of interlocking shape and vibrating color, it is her hope that the final experience might re-immerse viewers in that original meditative state, and instill in them some sense of the inherent feeling at work in the piece.

For more information visit the NUDASHANK blog

Chuck Palahniuk @ Enoch Pratt Central Library

Thursday, May 7 at 6:30pm, Chuck Palahniuk will read from his new novel, Pygmy.

Chuck Palahniuk's 10th novel, Pygmy, is a cultural satire featuring a gang of adolescent terrorists trained by an unspecified totalitarian state to infiltrate America. Posing as foreign exchange students, Pygmy and his cohorts are planning something big, something truly awful, that will bring the country to its knees.

Palahniuk's bestselling books include The Fight Club, Snuff, and Choke. Aaron Henkin of WYPR will moderate the conversation with Chuck Palahniuk.

The Ivy Bookshop will be selling presigned copies of Pygmy.

The Player @ the Charles Theatre this week

Showtimes:
Saturday, May 2 at noon
Monday, May 4 at 7 PM
Thursday, May 7 at 9 PM

1992 Robert Altman, Tim Robbins, Greta Scacchi, Fred Ward, Whoopi Goldberg, Peter Gallagher, Dean Stockwell, Richard E. Grant, Lyle Lovett, Gina Gershon, Steve Allen, Rene Auberjonois, Harry Belafonte, Karen Black, James Coburn, Peter Falk, John Cusack, Louise Fletcher, Elliott Gould, Buck Henry, Anjelica Huston, Jeff Goldblum, Jack Lemmon, Nick Nolte, Burt Reynolds, Lily Tomlin, Rod Steiger, etc. 124m.


In the early '90s, it looked as if Robert Altman's career had gone into a terminal tailspin; the film industry had basically written him off as yet another '70s maverick who'd crashed and burned. That backstory has made The Player's runaway success one of the sweetest, most satisfying comeback narratives in the history of American film. A whip-smart and wickedly hilarious satire of Hollywood's mad methods, The Player is as relevant today as it was 17 years ago, a testament to either Altman's perspicacity or Hollywood's ongoing ossification, probably both. The nonstop flurry of star cameos and insider's insider references will keep film junkies high, but beneath the slick merriment there's a center as bone-chilling as ice queen June Gudmundsdottir's (Greta Scaatchi) cold-blooded art. The Player has been touted as Altman's love/hate tribute to the system that had both embraced and scorned him, but in the end, it's pretty difficult to feel the love here. If you look closely, it's hard not to see that even America's beloved “sweetheart,” Julia Roberts, comes off as smug and self-satisfied; this portrait of a culture wallowing in narcissism and greed lets no one off the hook, maybe even the viewer. (Linda DeLibero)