Frye Art Museum – Cadence 2025: a new place for these treasures [In-Person Offsite]

Watch in person: April 24 at 6–8pm

** Hybrid Festival Passes include in-person access to this program! If you plan to attend, your name will be at Will Call. **

Register now! > ($15 General Admission / $5 Community Access)

TICKETING POLICY
Tickets are required, and availability is limited. Each person may purchase up to four tickets. Tickets may be purchased online, if available, until 11:59 pm PT the night prior to the program. Tickets are nonrefundable. A limited number of walk-up tickets may be available for purchase starting 30 minutes prior to the program. Parking can be an issue in First Hill, so please plan your visit accordingly. Registration is confirmed by email. Questions? Contact learning@fryemuseum.org

About the program:

(59 min TRT)

Undoing the ordinary, the familiar, the forgotten, these video poems bring past relics into the present, use common tools unusually, and transform everyday spaces into ritualistic settings. In conversation with Dawn Cerny’s wondrous domestic landscape, the artists excavate and archive personal, familial, and found histories through language, craft, movement, and play. Objects are activated, memories are illuminated, and the private and public intertwine to reveal the importance of places and props in shaping our relationships. What do we hold precious?

Join us for a special screening followed by a discussion from local and international filmmakers. This event is in person in the Frye auditorium.

Header photo credit: legs (still), 2023; courtesy of Christine Fellows, Jennifer Still, and Chantel Mierau
Showcase title credit: Stormers (Fırtına) (still), 2022; courtesy of Esme Madra

REGISTER HERE

♿ Click for accessibility info ♿
ℹ️ FAQ: How do I watch in-person? ℹ️
  • Register through the Frye Art Museum; come to the show!
  • You can also get a ticket on the day of the screening at Frye Art Museum (704 Terry Ave, Seattle).
🌐 FAQ: How do I watch online? 🌐
  • This program is available for in-person viewing only.

Films in this program:

legs

Three artists work in stride to translate, in sound and motion, the heart of a poem. They collaborate with life’s unexpecteds—snapped clotheslines, drained swimming pools, terminal diagnoses—and learn what falls away is not necessarily gone. 

(directors: Christine Fellows, Jennifer Still, Chantel Mierau, poet: Jennifer Still, Canada, 2023, 14 min, in English)

This One Thing

King County Recology’s Material Recovery Facility in Seattle is a curiosity: a site ripe for anthropological digs, offering a continual parade of infinitely mucky, diverse, commingled materials that form a collective portrait of desire, consumption, and willful forgetting. Along the route of the behemoth sorting machine, where humans pick out contaminants by hand, there is a place where paper waste is shuffled along: faded family photos, handwritten homework, Valentines and love letters, postcards and pornography. This film is about one such thing. 

(Amanda Manitach, US, 2023, 1 min, in English with hardcoded English text)

whereverever

Recorded on location in Finland and Japan—the respective ancestral homelands of Canadian choreographic duo Mardon + Mitsuhashi—this docu-poem intertwines visits with relatives, folk and contemporary dancing, and playful noticings of rupture with a focus on gesture, movement, and impulse. whereverever is a spell to visit with ancestors past and future through the technologies of dreaming, dancing, and fabulating what isn’t and cannot be known—treating the gaps, tears and absences as valuable knowledges, too. 

(Alysha Seriani, Erika Mitsuhashi & Alexa Solveig Mardon, Canada, 2023, 16 min, in English, Finnish, and Japanese with English subtitles)

Wandering Houses (Casas Errantes)

World Premiere!

One poet visits the house of her friend, also a poet, in Lisbon. Both migrants from Barranquilla, Colombia, they journey together between clothespins, mango, and waves.

(directors: Lilián Pallares & Charles Olsen, poets: Lilián Pallares & Lauren Mendinueta, Spain, 2025, 9 min, in Spanish with English subtitles)

After Grace IV

As the artist disappears and reappears through a retrospective installation of their work, After Grace IV is a visual relic of Dez’Mon’s first foray into performance art. In an attempt to hold space for opposing principles while escalating towards a common vision, the After Grace series has become an ongoing project where filmmakers create pieces based on the same poem—a poem that convinced a painter to strongly consider writing, then writing strongly advocated for performance, then performance insisted upon installation. After Grace, as a whole, is meant to remind the artist of origins, being green, the earnestness and eagerness of unrefined creativity holding the many hands of collaboration and possibility, being led in many directions in the hopes of returning as something familiar, however renewed.

(director: Camille Cotteverte, poet: Dez’Mon Omega Fair, US, 1 min, in English)

Stormers (Fırtına)

The playful dynamic between two people whose games shield them from reality is disrupted with the arrival of a third to their home. The newcomer shifts this flourishing space, changing the rules of the game and forcing all three of them to construct a new way of relating to one another.

(Esme Madra, Türkiye, 2022, 17 min, in Turkish with English subtitles)


About the exhibition:

Dawn Cerny: Portmeirion

Seattle artist Dawn Cerny’s abstract sculptures transform a museum gallery into a colorful domestic landscape. Her interactive furniture pieces crafted from humble materials celebrate the theatricality of everyday life, often to humorous effect. The exhibition opens a literal window into the neighboring Frye Salon, where Cerny’s contemporary works mingle among the traditional oil paintings. Archly embracing the tension between real and artificial, Cerny’s work underscores that the original Frye Salon—the in-home gallery of Charles and Emma Frye—was both a private living space and a carefully staged backdrop for public social events.

Image credit: Dawn Cerny. Kleenex Side-table for Simone Weil, 2024. Wood, paint, cardboard, Aqua-Resin, epoxy clay, fiberglass, Kleenex, Boucherouite rug, wire, trash bag. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.


About the co-presenter:

Frye Art Museum

Founded in 1952, the Frye is Seattle’s only free art museum, bringing together art and new ideas within a stunning Olson Sundberg Kundig-designed building in historic First Hill. A founding collection of turn-of-the-century oil paintings is bolstered by a wide range of modern and contemporary art holdings, reflecting our region’s evolving identity and a commitment to exploring the art of our time. Learn more at fryemuseum.org.


Back to Festival Home

Cadence Video Poetry Festival is a series of screenings, workshops, and discussions on the genre of video poetry during National Poetry Month.

Cadence approaches video poetry as a literary genre presented as visual media that makes new meaning from the combination of text and moving image. Featuring screenings, an artist residency, generative workshops for youth and adults, artist gatherings, and a virtual poetry bookshelf, Cadence fosters critical and creative growth around the medium of video poetry.


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Northwest Film Forum
1515 12th Ave,

Seattle, WA 98122

206 329 2629


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