In Plain Sight Film Series – Community Action Center [Online]
This event took place on May 6, 2020
Sliding scale admission: $5–25
Please pay what you can; proceeds support our move to a virtual platform!
Northwest Film Forum is SCREENING ONLINE! NWFF and Henry Art Gallery’s physical spaces are temporarily closed in light of public health concerns around COVID-19, but community, dialogue, and education through media arts WILL persist.
• • HOW TO WATCH • •
- Purchase a ticket through Brown Paper Tickets in advance of the listed showtime (PDT). Registration ends 1 hour before the start time.
- 30 minutes before each screening, NWFF will send a link and password to your registered e-mail address! (Don’t see it? Check your spam filter.) The password will expire at the end of the screening. No late seating!
- If by showtime you do not receive an e-mail with details, please contact louie@nwfilmforum.org for a quick follow-up. (But please, check your spam!)
A.K. Burns & A. L. Steiner
US
2010
1h 9m
Series -
In Plain Sight Film Series [Online]
About
** This film features explicit sexual content and is intended for audiences 18+. **
Community Action Center is a 69-minute sociosexual video by A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner which incorporates the erotics of a community where the personal is not only political, but sexual. This project was heavily inspired by porn-romance-liberation films, such as works by Fred Halsted, Jack Smith, James Bidgood, Joe Gage and Wakefield Poole, which served as distinct portraits of the urban inhabitants, landscapes and the body politic of a particular time and place. Community Action Center is a unique contemporary womyn-centric composition that serves as both an ode and a hole-filler.
Because the video contains sexually explicit content, the term ‘porn’ is relevant and the artists have an interest in exploring the trappings of the term itself. Sex, sexuality and the complexities of gendered bodies are inherently political. Queer sex and feminist agency is a shared acknowledgment of reciprocal penetration. This project is a small archive of an intergenerational community built on collaboration, friendship, sex and art. The work attempts to explore a consideration of feminist fashion, sexual aesthetics and an expansive view of what is defined as ‘sex’. Burns and Steiner worked with artists and performers who created infinitely complex gender and performance roles that are both real and fantastical, set to a soundtrack of music and original compositions by artists culled from the worldwide sisterhood. The video seeks to expose and reformulate paradigms that are typical of porn typologies, intentionally exploiting tropes for their comical value, critical consideration and historical homage. Using the gallery to exer/exorcise the mystical and discreet lost spaces of homosocial configuration, the artists have created a reason and a space to reflect on the cultural realness of homo-grown lesbian sexuality. The work aims to be a hedonistic and distinctly political adventure.
Image copyright of the artist, courtesy of Video Data Bank, www.vdb.org, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
This program is co-presented with Henry Art Gallery as part of the In Plain Sight Film Series
The Henry Art Gallery and Northwest Film Forum co-present the In Plain Sight Film Series [Online] on the occasion of In Plain Sight, a museum-wide group exhibition that highlights narratives, communities, and histories typically hidden in our public space imagining new possibilities for the future.
Coinciding with the Henry’s exhibition, the Forum’s film series invites engagement with hidden histories and contexts unearthed with the aid of moving image media. Programs explore the myriad shades of nuance in disciplinary synthesis and delight in the discovery of new relationships between poetry, artifactology, and cinema.
Presented in partnership with ByDesign Festival, Cadence: Video Poetry Festival, and the UW Bothell Black Cinema Collective. Learn more about Henry membership and NWFF membership and support the arts during this challenging time!