Hardcore Home Movies

Tuesday, March 3, 2015, 8:30 pm
REDCAT

631 West 2nd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012

Program:

Jonesy, Fiend, super 8 on DV, 3min., 1992
Greta Snider, Hard-Core Home Movie, 16mm, 5min., 1989
Jill Reiter, Birthday Party, 16mm on DV, 9min, 1993
G.B. Jones, The Troublemakers, super 8 on DV, 20min., 1990
Scott Treleaven, The Salivation Army, super8 and SD video, 22min., 2001
Rick Castro, '3. Dr. Chris Teen Sex Surrogate' (excerpt from Three Faces of Women), VHS, 25min., 1994 (video)
Greta Snider, Our Gay Brothers, 16mm, 9min., 1993

Hardcore Home Movies assembles film and video works that celebrate the joyful fluidity found in recent annals of queer history—when gay and lesbian sexualities were not so tidily divided, when hardcore and DIY filmmaking brought together a generation of flamboyant outsiders who drifted from sexuality to sexuality, town to town. Working from punk and queercore archives, the program showcases essential works by G.B. Jones, Greta Snider and Scott Treleaven in addition to unearthing recent finds and lesser-known titles from Rick Castro, Jonesy and Jill Reiter.

Rick Castro is an independent filmmaker, photographer and curator who has lived in Los Angeles his entire life. His photography has been featured in Art in America, Flaunt, Attitude UK, DNA and Tetu magazines. Castro co-wrote and co-directed the iconic film Hustler White, staring Tony Ward, that premiered at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival, receiving both high praises and scorn from critics. After the French Minister of Culture Jack Lang declared Hustler White a work of art, the film had theatrical screenings worldwide and is now considered a cult classic. It has been preserved by the UCLA Legacy Project and was listed in the top 100 independent films of the 20th century by Los Angeles Times film critic Manohla Dargis. Castro also directed the infamous documentary Plushies & Furries for MTV in 2001. In November 2005, he founded ANTEBELLUM gallery in Hollywood, the only fetish art gallery in America, and perhaps the world.

G.B. Jones was born in Canada and works in film, drawing, design, music and publishing. She has been making movies since 1985 and her work has been exhibited throughout North America, South America, Europe, Israel and Australia. Her most recent movie, The Lollipop Generation, was showcased at the Gala Premiere for The 2008 Images Festival. A retrospective of her earlier work, including The Yo-Yo Gang and The Troublemakers, was held by Women In The Directors Chair in Chicago.

G.B. Jones creates her movies on Super 8 mm film and analogue video utilizing guerrilla film tactics and embracing a no-budget credo she refers to as "The Aesthetics of Poverty," which is as much about formal concerns as it is about the socio-political. As such, her movies have been frequently regarded as forerunners for important cultural movements that have emerged in the past three decades.

Jonesy is an artist and experimental filmmaker from Los Angeles. In the 1990s, he was a member of the seminal homocore band Fagbash. He has shown his animated films at the Oberhausen Film Festival, Outfest LA, Mix NYC, Image+Nation Montreal, Pink Screens Festival in Brussels, Belgium and at Basso in Berlin, Germany.

Jill Reiter is a filmmaker whose super 8 and 16mm films captured an ephemeral time in 1990s queer underground subculture. They have shown at the New Museum, The Whitney, The Kitchen & at film festivals in the U.S. and Europe. As an excavationist & curator of visual detritus of the 20th century, she has created subterranean montages that can be seen in large-scale video projections at nightclubs such as SF drag institution Heklina's Oasis, & museums including SFMOMA & Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Reiter is currently reconfiguring her experimental 1994 new wave mini-featurette In Search of Margo-go (which stars Kathleen Hanna & other luminaries of the queerpunk/riot grrrl early 90's milieu) to include animation & live performative/musical elements. A work-in-progress screening showed to a sold out crowd at London's Fringe Festival in November 2014.

Greta Snider is an experimental filmmaker. Her earlier work on 16mm includes a collection of audio and visual experiences that combines photography, found footage, and her own experiences of the San Francisco punk scene in the early 1990s. Her work includes experiments with simultaneous soundtracks (Blood Story, 1990), engaging personal accounts of a scraped-together journey with friends (Portland, 1996), and an audio travelogue of the San Francisco punk scene. Her films explore the importance of small memories, retrieving pieces of ephemera from the underground and re-presenting them on screen.

Snider’s more recent work includes a series of slide show projections done in collaboration with Johunna Grayso and comprised of hand-processed photographs and stereoscopic images. The series is described as an update on the campy Viewmaster format, riffing on the concept of the travelogue to present the unseen and underground aspects.

Scott Treleaven was born in Canada, in 1972. Since first coming to attention in 1996 with his independent publication, This Is the Salivation Army, and his groundbreaking documentary, Queercore, Treleaven’s work has been predominantly concerned with the expression of the anomie and atypical cultural phenomenon (e.g. civil disobedience, abnormal psychology, occultism, fringe sexuality, etc.) and how these ideas and behaviors are articulated and illustrated. He has incorporated a wide variety of media into his practice, including collage, video, photography and installation, and this versatility has allowed him to collaborate with a number of notable artists including AA Bronson, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Dennis Cooper, Kevin Drew (of Broken Social Scene), director Carter Smith, and G.B. Jones.

Recent exhibitions of note include: Male, Maureen Paley, London (2010); Silver Make-Up, The Breeder, Athens (2009); Where He Was Going, John Connelley Presents, New York (2008); Love Addiction: Practices In Video Art from 1961 to Present, Italy (2007); Biennale de Montreal (2007); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006). He lives and works in Paris and Toronto.