PLACE PEOPLE: CATALINA ALVAREZ AND PATRICK TOPITSCHNIG

THURSDAY, JUNE 30 – 7:30 PM
ARTISTS IN PERSON!
ONE NIGHT ONLY!

In Place People, the video works of artists Patrick Topitschnig and Catalina Alvarez are presented in counterpoint: documentary forms are explored and deconstructed, technology and ecology merge and emerge, and landscape mythologies and their characters are explored in various shades of truth and fiction.

PLACE
wherethereisawill, 2005, 2:42, Austria, Patrick Topitschnig
Carusel, 2017, 5:47, Romania, Patrick Topitschnig
KRIPPE/CRIB, 2012, 6:06, Austria, Patrick Topitschnig
Mark&Garry, 2013, 7:20, Australia, Patrick Topitschnig
FELD, 2019, 5:21, Mexico, Patrick Topitschnig

PEOPLE
Sound Spring Seq. #3, 2020, 10:50, USA, Catalina Alvarez
Sound Spring Seq. #6, 2020, 11:03, USA, Catalina Alvarez
Paco 2016, 12 min, USA, Catalina Alvarez
RUMOR MACCHINA, 2009, 2:44, Austria, Patrick Topitschnig
schnitzl, 2006, 15sec, Austria, Patrick Topitschnig

Approximate runtime: 65 minutes.

Catalina Alvarez makes choreographed films and experimental musicals. In her anthology documentary, Sound Spring, residents of Yellow Springs, Ohio become actors lip-syncing to their own interviews, narrating their village’s role in American history over hundreds of years. Her 16mm shorts include Paco, the story of a man who wants you to bounce on his lap. With this film and all her others, Catalina Alvarez gets to know her neighbors.

Patrick Topitschnig is an Austrian filmmaker and audio artist whose works also include collaborations with theatre projects.

“A kind of black humor pervades Patrick Topitschnig’s videos. Like in the horror-movie genre he works with audiovisual situations which affect the bodies of the spectators, provoking an uncertainty, sometimes a slight restlessness. Precisely composed images expose their own constructedness and testify to the artist’s interest in cinematic duration. Occasionally, this duration becomes a metaphor for the literal “lifetime” of protagonists, objects, and buildings. All aspects of cinematic sound – a composed score, music, spoken language – are used to reflect the connections between image and narration creating a very specific atmosphere, whereas the “real“ backstory of a work is often revealed much later, be it the history of an abandoned salt mine in Romania or a portrait of a high-tech funeral home in Australia.“ – Claudia Slanar

Co-Presented by Flux Factory.

Flux Factory is a not-for-profit arts community space in Long Island City, Queens. Flux Factory’s Mission is to support emerging artists through Artist-in-Residencies and Exhibitions, education and collaborative opportunities. Flux is an artist-led space that builds sustainable communities and retains creative vitality in NYC. Since 1994, Flux has hosted over 300 Artists-in-Residence, both local and international, as well as staging over 700 exhibitions across all disciplines.

https://www.fluxfactory.org