Automata Arts
AUTOMATA presents Threshold to Threshold: Charlotte Clermont and Tzuan Wu
Saturday April 29, 2023 at 7:30 PM
Doors at 7pm
AUTOMATA presents
Threshold to Threshold:
Join us on Saturday April 29 as we present the second program in a new film screening series Threshold to Threshold, curated by Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu
This program includes recent works by two contemporary experimental filmmakers: Charlotte Clermont and Tzuan Wu
About the Program:
Threshold to threshold, pasts to presents, language colliding with language, one crossroad and the next. The Threshold to Threshold film series embraces these precarious states. The films we are interested in transmit landscapes, people, and histories that are constantly being displaced or forgotten. The challenges presented by the works are various, but because there are thousands of thresholds we can go thousands of places.
On April 29, 2023 Threshold to Threshold will present work by two contemporary experimental filmmakers, Charlotte Clermont and Tzuan Wu. Clermont’s films traverse experimental space-time, non-place, and confusing poetry. Wu's film revolves around a family's past, unfolding a cross-generational thinking about wandering and settling. Through a variety of media, their work captures the fragility of images and materiality, and the memories of a family diaspora.
The first part of the program consists of three short films by Clermont: where i don't meet you, Lucina Annulata, and We Are The Way We Are Because Nature Will Allow It. The second part features This Shore: A Family Story 此岸：一個家族故事by Tzuan Wu.
Runtime: 77 mins.
Artist Bios:
Charlotte Clermont:
With a background in experimental film, Charlotte Clermont creates a dialogue between video and audio explorations to examine our perceptions of the real. The performative aspect of her practice, moved by a desire to transpose the illusiveness of lived moments, is embodied in her singular way of working with analogue recording devices. Using materials from her immediate environment, she works upon the chemical sensitivity of film through various alterations, while leaving a large place to chance. Her works testify to an intimate relationship with the materiality of the medium. Imbued with a sensuality and eroticism, they reveal a dissension among polarities by inscribing themselves in the interval between the accessible and inaccessible. These tensions arouse fantastical projections of the imminent, deployed on the porous boundary of the real, the proposed fragmentary combinations serving as points of entry into a precise spacetime that allows one to observe the fragility of ephemeral sensations. Woven of autofictional fragments, they draw on an intimate memory, mingling dreams and memories and de/sanctifying reminiscences. Clermont’s approach also borrows from musical codes, using rhythmical structures and leitmotifs to assemble textures and chromatic bursts that create a narrativity and semiology of the image. Her work generally develops an inherent, autonomous, and symbolically encoded metalanguage.
Charlotte Clermont is pursuing a master's degree in Time and Space Art at University of the Arts Helsinki in Finland. Her work has been presented internationally in the framework of festivals and exhibitions, including Fracto (Germany), IFF Rotterdam (Netherlands), CROSSROADS (United States), and the Edinburgh International Film Festival (Scotland).
Text by Myriam Le Ber Assiani / translation by Ron Ross.
Tzu-An Wu 吳梓安
Tzu-An Wu works between experimental film and its expansions. He makes collages with analogue films, through mixing heterogeneous images, audio, and texts in an attempt to inquire about the constructs of (cinematic) narratives and the selves.
He holds an MA in Media Studies from The New School, New York, and a BA in Gender and Cultural Studies from NTHU, Taiwan. His works have been shown internationally, including BFI Flare (London), IFFR (Netherland), CROSSROADS (San Francisco), Golden Horse Film Festival (Taiwan), TIDF(Taiwan). Exhibitions include Taipei Art Awards, Taiwan Biennial, Metropolitan Museum of Manila, and Taipei Artist Village, etc. He also does programming of experimental cinema.
Curator Bio
Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, writer, and curator whose work is grounded in literature and the conceptual avant-garde. Cherlyn’s creative activity starts from a life event, an anomaly in language or in the material world. It continues by employing methods drawn from both Eastern and Western practices and philosophies. Her working method at various times involves handcrafted material, mixed media, and experimental interchange between new and old technologies.
She is a lecturer at CalArts, teaching experimental film. She is co-curator of Move Screen, Process Cinema, the founder of Experimentalist Media Collective, the editor of B-Journal, and serves as a programmer for the Experimental session of Slamdance Film Festival.
This program is supported, in part, by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and Los Angeles County Arts and Culture.