Dirty Looks: Eight Years On

Sunday, January 27, 2019, 8:00 pm
Ace Hotel - Segovia Hall

929 S. Broadway
Los Angeles, CA 90025

  • Filmmakers Mariah Garnett, Aimee Goguen, Brontez Purnell, Jill Reiter + Michael Robinson in attendance!
    Reception DJ set by Discostan

Program:
Warren Sonbert + Wendy Appel, Amphetamine, 16mm, B&W, 10 min., 1966
Brontez Purnell, 100 Boyfriends Mixtape (the demo), Super 8 on video, 8min., 2017
Jill Reiter, Frenzy, Super 8 on digital video, 12min., 1993
Lila De Magalhaes, Poppers (promo for Xina Xurner), video, 5min., 2013
Michael Robinson, Onward Lossless Follows, HD video, 17min., 2017
Chris E. Vargas, Liberaceón, SD video, 13min., 2011
Aimee Goguen, tongue job, Hi8 on SD video, 4min., 2013
Mariah Garnett, Encounters I May or May Not Have Had with Peter Berlin, 16mm, 15min., 2012

Dirty Looks celebrates our eighth anniversary with a retrospective program of signature delights that queer the pop cannon and (under)mine history for all of her unanswered questions. Ranging from digital drag revisionism to post-bohemian celluloid, Dirty Looks: Eight Years On reassesses the past through a fiercely queer and politicized lens: “who brought us here?” and “where are we now?” Selected across eight years of screenings, from 16mm films, super8 transfers, Hi8, HD video and Getty stock footage, this DL Cliff’s Notes spins circles around contemporary queer subjectivities, snarling with a punk zeal and a utopian demand for more.

Filmed while the artist was still studying at NYU, Amphetamine is a drug-addled portal into 60s bohemian culture by way of impressionistic experimental cinema. Gay druggy sex and The Supremes. The usual.
Initially screened April 25, 2012 at Judson Memorial Church

Commissioned by Visual Aids, the uncensored version of Brontez Purnell’s “demo” casts the punk musician, author, choreographer and filmmaker as Warhol starlet Edie Sedgwick and occasions to wonder just how much trouble can she get into in one loquacious bathtub phone call.
Initially screened October 19, 2018 at Never Apart, Montreal

Recently reconstructed from the original super8 negatives, Jill Reiter’s free-wheeling concert fantasia depicts a Riot Grrrl gig in the desolate warehouse district of Williamsburg (it was the 90s). Frenzy comes on like an attitudinal document of the exploding music scene, where a wanton crowd tears the band apart mid set and a cunnilingus line offers just desserts.
Initially screened October 15, 2012 at MIX Film Festival

A promo video for the single from Xina Xurner’s debut album, Die. In Poppers, band members Marvin Astorga and Young Joon Kwak conjure an orgiastic Ophelia in the back of a Toyota flat bed, with the help of their Mutant Salon crew.
DL collaborated with Astorga and Kwak as curators in On Location, 2018

An oblique and suggestive rumination on a lovers discourse in the socio-digital/doomsday age, Michael Robinson’s newest video overloads disparate signifiers to depict how text exchanges construct emotional space. Is this a new, borderless frontier for communication, or did we just ditch the password, allowing for yet another psychical kidnap?
DL's first collaboration with Robinson took place April 20, 2011 at Participant Inc

Liberace died in February of 1987. The following month ACT UP was formed. In Chris E. Vargas’ humorous digital drag reenactment, the artist suggests reparative measures for this rather problematic queer icon. What if the activist organization was founded on account of this dying man’s cri de ceour?
DL presented the first-ever survey of Vargas' film work February 26, 2013 at Anthology Film Archives

Combining grainy, Hi8 video with experimental animation and ominous sound design, Aimee Goguen’s videos depict the artist and friends in fraternal playroom hazings, displaced erotic games that test the limits of intimacy and bodily functions when the task at hand is pushed a touch too far.
Initially screened May 28, 2014 at White Columns

In Mariah Garnett’s 16mm evocation of a queer porn star, the artist drifts through three unlikely scenarios for iconographic reflection. Posing, projecting and documenting all have their representational pitfalls in this hypothetical artistic union.
Initially screened February 14, 2012 at The Hammer Museum

Discostan is a collective dedicated to media from Beirut to Bangkok via Bombay. Discostan has been featured in KCET's Artbound, Good Magazine, and LA Weekly. On her monthly show, Radio Discostan, founder Arshia Haq presents musical narratives from Eastern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia and eastward to the edge of the earth. Narrative threads include migration, celebration, warfare, nostalgia, homeland, borders, often within realms of Islamic influence, through the lenses of timeless traditional forms, the kaleidoscopic reinventions of pop culture, and everything in between and beyond. Most simply, Discostan is a love letter to the Dis-Orient.