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Because the Night

Presented by Aurora Picture Show at DiverseWorks ArtSpace

February 6, 2010

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Aurora Picture Show presents Because the Night, Saturday, February 6, 7pm, at DiverseWorks.  Curator Catherine Forster in attendance.

Mayhem, sex, battles, romance, war, dreams, and abstract works that evoke the poetics of night. Inspired by Patti Smith’s recording “Because the Night,” Catherine Forster of LiveBox has curated a program of short works that reflect the many facets of human behavior and habitats of the night. Artists featured in the program include: Caleb Engstrom, Fabienne Gautier, Paulo Fernandez, Christina McPhee, Midori Sakuraï, Pierre St-Jacques, and Michael Szpakowski.

LiveBox, a non-for profit space, utilizes Chicago and its neighborhoods as gallery, bringing new media art to the people of Chicago. LiveBox also seeks collaborative relationships with like-minded galleries and museums to create new media events.

More about the featured artists: 

Caleb Engstrom lives in Iowa City, his art practice includes video, sculpture, installation and music (he is a songwriter), and curation. His body of work that draws upon ideas of labor, tests of will, and the ephemeral. In 2008, a year after completing his undergraduate degree, Engstrom initiated and co-organized Public Space ONE Gallery, a nonprofit artist run space in Iowa City, IA and is currently directing BS Gallery, an artist run 10' x 32' basement space in his home.

Fabienne Gautier lives and works in Paris and deploys multiple mediums in her art practice, including photography, video and film. Her work has been shown internationally in galleries and festivals, including The New Museum of Contemporary Art NYC, The Kitchen NYC, Locarno Rotterdam, Media City Canada, Paris Berlin Meetings, Revelation Perth Australia, and The New York Underground Festivals to name a few. Her short “Night Walk” has been awarded Best International Film at the 2006 Delta International Film and Video Festival USA.

Paulo Fernandez is a young multimedia artist from Chili. I know very little about him other than he is prolific and consistent in his delivery of original and compelling videos.

Christina McPhee is a native of Los Angeles; Christina grew up in Nebraska. She attended Scripps College, Claremont and later earned the BFA in painting from Kansas City Art Institute, followed by the MFA in painting from Boston University School for the Arts, where she was a student of Philip Guston. During the eighties and nineties she worked in large-scale drawings from medium format and 35 mm photographs she shot at archaeological and geologic sites in the American West. Since the mid nineties her practice expanded into new media arts, retaining a deep involvement in direct observation through drawing and photography. She lives and works in the central coast of California and in San Francisco. McPhee’s current practice involves creating topologic site explorations in layered suites involving on-site photographs, video, drawing, and interactive new media. She is involved with the poetics of traumatic memory in landscape performance.

Midori Sakuraï is Japanese and lives and works in Paris-Montreuil (France). Sakurai has a B.A. in Japanese literature and in 1991 she worked as a journalist-correspondent in Paris for the design magazine FP (Gakken Co., Ltd). Since 1996 she has been working in media arts primarily in performance art. In 2005 she began exploring video and video installation that is her primary medium today.

Pierre St-Jacques studied Fine Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design where his initial ideas about perception and the structure of narrative were planted. His two latest projects "clouds and raindrops" and "token of my affection" continue to explore these themes today with an emphasis on how individuals construct themselves and their worlds. Pierre has recently showed at AIM24 at the Bronx Museum of Art, The Studio in Armonk New York, The Knitting Factory in New York City and Real Artways in Hartford.

Michael Szpakowski is an artist, composer & educator. His music has been performed all over the UK, in Russia & the USA. He has exhibited work in galleries in the UK, mainland Europe, Australia & the USA. His short films have been shown throughout the world. This year his short film ‘Incident’ was awarded the main jury prize at the Pocket Films Festival at the Forum des Images in Paris, France. He is composer & video artist for Tell Tale Hearts Theatre Company & a joint editor of the online video resource DVblog.