Date: Wednesday, March 23rd
Time: 7pm
Admission: $10
Location: Morbid Anatomy Museum, 424 Third Avenue, 11215 Brooklyn NY

Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2485442

Katherine Bauer in an artist working with incantation-like performances captured in 16mm film and video, dead remains of roadkill preserved through crystallization in various chemical brews, and large, arcane paper photograms. An evening of her moving image works will be presented at the Morbid Anatomy Museum, with musical scores performed live by the artist, and concluding with the film-portrait by MM Serra “Breathe Deep,” documenting Bauer’s sculptural work with crystallized and mummified animal remains.

An amalgam of influences and correspondences can be found in Bauer’s work, from the cine-magic of the camera’s conjuring tricks of Georges Melies by way of the ritualistic cine-dreams of Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger in “Circa” (2009), “Invocation” (2009), and “Ichor” (2008), to a b-movie horror milieu inflected with a Kuchar Brothers drollery in “Psycho Pussy Slaughter” (2006) and her “Crystallus” film series.

Bauer performs a solemn disinterment of her beloved cat in “Death Love” (2011), the camera gazing impassively at the dematerialization of flesh, the coat of fur still encasing the remains as we scrutinize the protruding white teeth and bones of the once-living feline companion.

We conclude with “Breathe Deep” (2012) by New York-based filmmaker MM Serra, featuring Katherine Bauer’s wet preservations of animal remains, submerged in crystal-producing liquids. Filmed in super-8, a photochemical medium also is an act of crystallized preservation in silver halide form, the work is described by MM Serra as a document of cathartic transformation: “The crystallized corpses are not simply beautiful or or simply putrid, but blur the distinction, lying in a layered chimeric space.”

Katherine Bauer and MM Serra will be present to introduce the program and discuss the work at its conclusion. The screening will include live music performed by Katherine Bauer to accompany many of the films.

Katherine Bauer works with photochemical manipulations primarily in 16mm film expanding its material potential into the field of sculpture, photography, and performance. Her work often is based in storytelling, either implicitly or explicitly, drawing from mythologies, folklore, science fictions, and the horror genre. Bauer works with her film scenes as performance rituals that also result in the creation of photographs and photograms. She has shown and performed across the United States and internationally in a variety of venues such as Anthology Film Archives, The Kitchen, Light Industry, Millennium Film Workshop, Microscope Gallery, the Museum of Moving Image, New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA), Havana Film Festival in Cuba, and Cité International des Arts in Paris. She received a BA from Bard College in Film and Electronic Arts, an MFA from NYU, Steinhardt Department of Art, and was a resident student at University Paris, Panthéon Sorbonne exchange program. She is represented by Microscope Gallery, and her films are distributed by The New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative, for which she also serves as the President of the Board of Directors. She is also a member of the New York based expanded cinema collective Optipus.
katherineannebauer.com

MM Serra is an experimental filmmaker, curator, author, and the Executive Director of Film-Makers’ Cooperative, the world’s oldest and largest archive of independent media. MM Serra’s work has screened at the New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, and Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight Series. Her film “Bitch Beauty” was part of a program “Cinema as Death” at the International School of Cinema and Television (EICTV) of San Antonio de los Baños in Cuba. Awards include the Kathy Acker Award for Lifetime Achievement of Excellence in Avant-Garde Art and the Director’s’ Choice prize at the Black Maria Film Festival. She has curated film screening that have been shown at the Pacific Design Center, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Office of Contemporary Art in Oslo, Norway, as well as programs in Warsaw and Paznan, Poland. MM Serra teaches in the Media Studies program at the New School for Social Research on topics such as horror films, sex and gender, as well as avant-garde cinema.
www.mmserra.com

Tickets are non-refundable unless the event is canceled.