SJSU Art Galleries Tuesday Night Lecture: Genevieve Quick
Tuesday, September 17, 2024 5 pm to 6 pm
Art Lecture Hall, Art Building Room 133

Press Release

reckonings in film: short film showcase in conjunction with P L A C E: Reckonings by Asian American Artists, San Jose ICA and Montalvo Center for the Arts, June 27, 2024.

Montalvo’s Project Space Gallery bar will be open before the event for sales of beverages and their book, Hello, Goodbye, Hello.

Two Lucas Artists Program Fellows, TT Takemoto and Genevieve Quick, will each screen three short films – see list below – followed by a Q&A with Abby Chen, Asian Art Museum Contemporary Art Head Curator and Curator of the Taiwan Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. TT Takemoto will present the following films: After Bed (2023), Ever Wanting (for Margaret Chung) (2021), and Lion in the Wind (2023). Genevieve Quick will present the following films: Rockette Odyssey (2020), Megaphone (2019), and Hello World (2022) finale with a sing along.

This event is a related program of P L A C E: Reckonings by Asian American Artists, an exhibition jointly organized by Montalvo Arts Center’s Lucas Artists Program and the ICA San Jose. The exhibition is on view at the ICA San Jose until August 11, 2024.

Film Descriptions:

After Bed (2023), 3 minutes – Pulsing flashbacks from the summer of love reawaken a queer California classic. Scavenged from color tests, the sole Asian America woman in James Broughton’s erotic film, The Bed, pulses with queerness through the celluloid cracks of 16 mm, tape, and nail polish.

Ever Wanting (for Margaret Chung) (2021), 6 min, 20 sec. – Soaring through the complicated life of San Francisco’s first Chinese American female physician, this film envisions the euphoria and despair of Margaret Chung (1889-1959) and her insatiable desire for women and belonging within a sea of white military heroes, nurses, and celebrities as it delves into drugs, sapphic surgeries, and queer flights of fancy.

Lion in the Wind (2023), 4 min., 50 sec. – A fugue for forgetting windmills in the West. This camera-less “emulsion lift” film was made from a discarded 35 mm reel of a Hong Kong martial arts western featuring Jet Li as a kung fu master who loses his memory and fights bandits and windmills as he makes his journey to Chinatown.

Rockette Odyssey (2020), 5 min., 3 sec. – Using traditional East Asian celadon ceramics as the framework for fantastical narratives that explore Asian American diasporic identity, this film is part of Quick’s Planet Celadon series. By exaggerating ideas of alienness, futurity, and tradition, she explores alternative forms of communication to address the challenges of communication globally and intergalactically.

Megaphone (2019), 3 min., 15 sec. – Made while in residency at Recology, Quick considers global manufacturing, technology, communication, culture, and transnationality in an immersive installation that includes audio, video, and interactive components. Megaphone borrows from the framework of silent films and transforms mundane voice mail messages that an anonymous woman left for her Vietnamese speaking mother. Megaphone merges familial and global communications with fantasy of sending messages to the universe.

Hello World (2022) finale, 4 min., 42 sec. – This video features CETI (Celadonian ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence), a fantastical research consortium that facilitates communication between Planet Celadon and Earth. As the narrative unfolds through live performance and a video game, the performers encounter a black hole, the multiverse, and communication outages that the scientists attempt to remedy. The finale blurs the boundaries between live performance and gaming, extending Quick’s exploration of global identity and politics in media-based practices.

Bios of participants:

Genevieve Quick is an interdisciplinary artist, arts writer, and critic whose work explores global identity and politics in speculative narratives, technology, and media-based practices. In her sculptures, installations, videos, and performance, her humorous science fiction narratives exaggerate diasporic identity to the intergalactic to address Otherness and displacement. She has exhibited at the CCA Campus Galleries, Aurora Picture Show (Houston). McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (Singapore), Wattis Institute, Asian Cultural Center (Gwangju, South Korea), Asian Art Museum, Mills College Art Museum, Royal Nonesuch Gallery, and Southern Exposure. Quick has been awarded visual arts residencies at The Headlands Center for the Arts, Recology, MacDowell, Djerassi, the de Young Museum, and Yaddo. She has received a San Francisco Arts Commission Grant, a Eureka Grant from the Fleishhacker Foundation, a Kala Fellowship, and grants from the Center for Cultural Innovation. Quick has contributed essays and reviews to 48 Hills, Artforum, C Magazine, Art Practical, Daily Serving, Temporary Art Review, and College Art Association.

TT Takemoto is a queer Japanese American artist exploring hidden dimensions of same-sex intimacy in Asian American history. Takemoto interacts with found footage and archival materials through labor-intensive processes of painting, lifting, and manipulating 16mm/35mm film emulsion using clear tape, razor blades, and nail polish. By engaging with tactile and sensory dimensions of queer histories, Takemoto conjures up immersive fantasies honoring Asian Americans who lived, loved, and labored together. Takemoto was awarded the Grand Jury Prize for Best Experimental Film at Slamdance Film Festival and Best Experimental Film Jury Award at Austin LGBTQ+ International Film Festival. They have received grants from Art Matters, ArtPlace, Fleishhacker Foundation, Lucas Artists Program at Montalvo Arts Center, and San Francisco Arts Commission. Their screenings include San Francisco’s SFMOMA, de Young Museum, and Asian Art Museum; Outfest (Los Angeles); Anthology Film Archive (New York); and internationally at BFI Flare (London, UK), Documenta 15 (Kassel, Germany), MIX Mexico (Mexico City), Marseille Underground Film Festival (France), Queer Forever! (Hanoi), Rio Gay Film Festival (Brazil), and Xposed International Queer Film Festival (Berlin).

Abby Chen is Head of Contemporary Art and Senior Associate Curator at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. She recently curated Into View: Bernice Bing and Kongkee: Warring States Cyberpunk. She is the curator of the exhibition presented in the Taiwan Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale entitled Everyday War, featuring primarily video works by artist Yuan Goang-Ming.

https://www.icasanjose.org/upcoming-events/reckoningsinfilm/
https://my.montalvoarts.org/2592/

https://montalvoarts.org/artist/genevieve-quick/

Genevieve Quick's author page of art reviews in 48Hills