Thursday, February 23, 8:00 – 10:00 PM

Grand Detour at BOOM BAP!

640 SE Stark St. Portland OR, 97214

Sliding-scale admission: $3-6.

DIRTY LOOKS! No, that’s not what we’ve been giving (or getting). That’s the New York-based queer film and video series that is going on a West Coast tour, and stopping in our fair City of Roses to screen a fantastic program! We here at Grand Detour are thrilled to be the hosts of Dirty Looks’ only public engagement in Rip City. We are STOKED to be screening at Boom Bap!, a great lil’ DIY multimedia workspace and classroom that has been tearing it up on First Fridays lately.

Female Trouble is an intergenerational cornucopia of genderfuck film that explores – and explodes – normative roles of femininity and gender. With pieces that span five decades, these artists queer female subject space via drag tactics, narrative juxtaposition and overt performativity, with approaches ranging from masquerade to mythic, performance document to exposé video zine.

Program:

Conrad Ventur, Mario Montez Screen Test, 2010
Patti Podesta, Stepping, 1981
Steven Arnold, Messages, Messages, 1968
Matthias Müller, Home Stories, 1990
Narcissister, Every Woman, 2010
Zackary Drucker, Fish, 2008
Vaginal Davis, Barbi Twins (excerpt), 1993

No matter how wrapped up in EFF (can we say we’re EFF’d?) Grand Detour is right now, this was a screening too good to pass up.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Grand Detour is proud to announce Experimental Film Fest Portland

to be held May 2012 in our fair city of Portland, Oregon.

EFFPortland was sparked by the desire to fill the current need for a Portland-based experimental media festival. A major impetus of the festival is to showcase the works of local media artists through a program of screenings, installations, artist talks, and hands-on workshops open to the general public. The festival will also feature work by national and international experimental media artists. The intention is to provide Portland audiences with a window into the diversity of work being created around the globe and connect local, national and international artists.

may 23-27, 2012

the mOuth studio

portland, or

This is why you haven’t heard from us in a while. We’ve been busy!

want to submit?

deadline is 2/15/12. portlandians and international artists pay no submission fees!

want to support?

we have a kickstarter! with awesome rewards and a pretty sweet video. please pass it on.

want to volunteer?
email info@effportland.com

Stay tuned…we will have LOTS of funding and programming updates to share as well as news about two upcoming screenings in February and April that will whet your whistle for EFFPDX!

10/6   Jeff Guay (PDX)  Recess Gallery

Jeff Guay is an under-unemployed citizen of Portland, Oregon, and a graduate of Portland State with an English degree. His most recent short films are investigations of environment – both physical and emotional – and man’s place, or lack thereof, in a world of mystery and compromise in civilization’s half-decline. Don’t Worry, it’s a New Century premiered in the 2009 Northwest Film and Video Festival, and toured around the western United States as part of their “Best of” series and also played at Seattle’s Northwest Film Forum. The Willamette Week called it “amusing” and Sasha Burchuk of PDX Pipeline says upon watching it, that “I just had to ask myself, what the fuck is going on here?”

Additional films to be screened include Principia, which had a warm reception at the 2010 ATA Film and Video Festival in San Francisco, Guay’s music video for Portland band Experimental Dental School (which has over 5,000 hits on vimeo) and a previously unscreened, secret premiere of a short whose name cannot be mentioned here…

10/18   Maarit Suomi (Finland)   Recess Gallery

11/17   Devon Damonte (Olympia, in conjunction with the NW FIlm Fest)   Worksound

11/22    Jason Gutz (Olympia)   Worksound

12/1   Jade Ajani (local)   Screen at Place

12/8 Seth Nehil (local)   Screen at Place

All Shows 8pm

Suggested Donation $3-6

All Donations to Artists

And watch out for what we got coming this Fall, Installations and Screenings abound!!

GD

Thursday, July 28, 2011, 8PM

RECESS Gallery, 1127 SE 10th, Portland, OR

GRAND DETOUR <3 JODIE MACK AND WE ARE STOKED STOKED STOOOOOKED

Click here to view the embedded video.

Grand Detour is Proud to Present:

David Sherman: Wasteland Utopias

Tuesday, July 26, 2011, 8PM

RECESS Gallery, 1127 SE 10th

The year is 1993. The place, San Francisco. David Sherman, experimental media-maker, founds the world’s first microcinema. Fast forward to 2011, and Portland’s own Grand Detour is hosting a screening of Sherman’s Wasteland Utopias, a cinematic essay featuring visionary developer Del Webb (Sun City) and legendary radical psychiatrist/naturalist Wilhelm Reich (Orgone Energy). What on earth could these two possibly have in common? The sunny Sonoran Desert for one thing, a shadowy CIA Operative for another. Desert landscapes, desert soulscapes, sex, sustainability, Emotional Plague, cloudbusting, water retention, cosmic intervention—these and other relevancies link the 1950s with our present moment in surprising, and seemingly prophetic, ways. Using found footage, documentary interviews, and narrative tableaux, the film interweaves contradictory narratives and critically poetic observations. By juxtaposing these two thinkers—who represent ostensibly opposing visions of a still-undefined future—Sherman asks viewers to consider a multiplicity of perspectives on our endangered natural and social environments.

Grand Detour Presents
Joel Schlemowitz!

Friday, July 8, 2011, 8PM

RECESS Gallery,
1127 SE 10th

Grand Detour Presents

The Autonomy of Place

Saturday, July 9, 8PM

RECESS gallery,
1127 SE 10th

The Cut + Run Tour is back in Portland one year after Grand Detour welcomed curators Mallary Abel and Brenda Contreras to town at their 2010 Bad Film Barbeque. This year, Grand Detour welcomes Cut + Run back to Stumptown and is proud to host The Autonomy of Place, another stellar program of short films, at RECESS Gallery at the Oregon Brassworks Building.

Cut + Run is a traveling film festival specializing in the exhibition of short avant-garde and experimental video and film programs. This year, they have stopped in Paris, Berlin, London, and San Francisco, and will finish their tour at the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles. The Autonomy of Place presents the work of American filmmakers from throughout the country. Each explores the fringes of The Autonomy of Place¬, uniquely investigating the capacities in which we recognize the politics and philosophies of the forgotten, overlooked, and sometimes-untold landscapes of our time and place. Featured artists include Robert Todd, Shelly Silver, Roger Beebe, Sara Zia Ebrahimi, Salise Hughes, Rick Bahto, and Charles Fairbanks.

Summer is finally here, so come enjoy it with us! Sink your teeth into it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Grand Detour Presents

Sound and Image Playground

at No.Fest Music and Arts Fair

Saturday, June 25, 2011, 2-6PM

Salle Trois Armes Fencing Studio

St. Johns

We here at Grand Detour are thrilled to have been invited back to No.Fest, an incredible celebration of art and community! This year, we will have 4 interactive stations set up for anyone to come and make their own sound and images. The playground is a series of stations that explore integral components of movie-making, both past and present. Using film projection, optical sound, direct animation, and veejaying, No.Fest visitors will be able to create their own pieces of experimental media, both singularly and collaboratively. It is free and open to all members of the community.
The first station of the playground will have participants creating their own soundtracks from a bin of found-footage clips, by pulling the film back and forth through the projector, experimenting with speed and existing sound. The second station focuses on creating sound through scratching into blackleader or silent found footage, which makes a soundtrack when passed over a projector’s opticalsound head. The possibilities are endless, whether participants choose to try and recreate anexisting tune or just scratch until it sounds good! The third station is all about direct animation and collaboration. A unified Frankenstein monster of abstract film will be created en masse, using black and clear leader and sharpies, ink, hole punches, or paint to create images and put them in motion. The final product will be used as part of an improvised performance by one of No.Fest’s many amazing musical acts, so participants will actually be collaborating on a music video! Finally, the last station will utilize a drum pad and Max MSP to mix, match, and filter in realtime, creating brand new combinations of images from an existing database. With the playground, Grand Detour will be able to combine art and education with community and experimentation, laying groundwork for more and more educational offerings in the future. Come on out for some fun!!!

Grand Detour Presents

Stefan Gruber: Both Worlds

June 30,  8PM

RECESS Gallery, Oregon Brassworks Building, 1127 SE 10^th

So excited to bring Seattle-based Stefan Gruber to Portland for this amazing presentation!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Both Worlds is a live performance art animation piece. Every show is fully participatory with audience presence greatly effecting the direction of the piece.Audiences are treated to a 10 minute cartoon with live score by a musician local to the area, and live voices by the animator and audience participants. The experience features a fully colored hand animated luscious cartoon world where hollow glass men learn to meditate and are filled to their brims with lightning, a mute liberator is granted 3 wishes in an Eden like garden, and cartoon deities sit upon mountaintops ready to trade gardening tips about their mountainside utopias. Each performance is accompanied by 2 improvised animated portraits drawn of audience members. In the closing section, a menu is given out of Gruber’s early works, and audience members call out their choices. This will be a 50 minute show, with optional 40 minutes of Q & A. Huge thanks to RECESS for hosting us!

Grand Detour is thrilled to participate in the nation-wide tour of Dancing for Dara, aprogram of video by internationally recognized artists who have donated their work insupport of their friend and colleague Dara Greenwald who was recently diagnosed withcancer. Organized by Chicago’s Video Data Bank, the program includes work by Paul Chan, Jem Cohen, Ben Coonley, Jim Finn, Dara Greenwald with Ona Mirkinson, TaraMatiek, The Pink Bloque, Melinda Stone & Igor Vamos, and Caspar Stracke & GabrielaMonroy. The screening takes place on Sunday, May 29, at 7:00pm at the HollywoodTheatre in Portland, Oregon.

Dara Greenwald is an artist/activist based in New York City. Her internationallyrecognized videos, performances, writing, and curatorial projects critique capitalismand promote progressive social change. Greenwald visited Portland in February2010, when the Pacific Northwest College of Art exhibited Signs of Change: SocialMovement Cultures 1960s to Now, a broad survey of posters and other ephemera frominternational social movements co-curated by Greenwald and Josh MacPhee.
In July 2010, Greenwald was diagnosed with cancer and is currently undergoingtreatment. While her health insurance covers part of the cost of her medical bills, shestill needs to pay tens of thousands of dollars for her care. Artists, colleagues, andfriends across the USA have been hosting fundraising events for Dara.

THE PROGRAM:

Pink Bloque, Dancing in the Street (Domestic Violence Awareness Month Rally),October 2003, video, 8:00
The Pink Bloque (2001-2005) was a Chicago-based radical feminist dance troupededicated to challenging the white supremacist capitalist patriarchal empire onestreet dance party at a time. In October 2003, the Chicago Metropolitan BatteredWomen’s Network, a coalition of more than 100 service providers in the Chicagoarea who assist domestic violence victims, asked Pink Bloque to participate in anawareness event. Unlike dancing bears, robot men, and circus clowns, they did notperform on cue, but this video documents how they joined in the spectacle. — JaneBryan Ball

Ben Coonley, One Trick Pony, 2002, video, 4:50 “Film nerds who haven’t seen Ben Coonley’s “One Trick Pony” are in for a real treattonight. In this almost five-minute-long 2002 short, a toy pony—yes, you read thatright—offers dance instructions for the Texas two-step. If that sounds a little simple, it is,but this cheeky short can still catch you off-guard.” Bret McCabe

Tara Matiek, Operation Invert, 2003, video, 12:30

http://daragreenwald.com/http://healdarag.org/http://www.vdb.org/http://grand-detour.org/http://hollywoodtheatre.org/

Are gender outlaws considered the new biological terrorists seeking weapons of massbodily destruction? OPERATION INVERT compares the different regulations mediatingbotox-related plastic surgery and gender re-assignment “sex change.”- t.m.
Caspar Stracke & Gabriela Monroy, Kuleshov Sukiyaki, 2004, video, 2:58
This video is based on the music piece “Systole No 2″ by Terre Thaemlitz. Analog tothis “systolic” sound collage, Kuleshov Sukiyaki contains a patchwork of clips from 70′serotica and soft porn movies which highlight similar emotional moments, including thebefores and afters of orgasm scenes. c.s. & g.m.

Melinda Stone & Igor Vamos, Suggested Photo Spots, 1997, video, 10:00
Using irony as a weapon, this documentary records the placement of overfifty “suggested photo spot” signs for tourists across North America, at such locationsas military test sites and industrial excavation centres. Other “scenic” areas: the fencerunning along the USA/Mexican border on Tijuana Beach, which extends well into theocean; an abandoned oil drilling site in Utah; the New York City sludge depository(situated in Texas since there is no space left for all the sludge engulfing New York);and the waste water treatment facility of the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester,New York.- Vincent Bonin
Jim Finn, Sharambaba, 1999, video, 3:00
A young communist girl named Sharambaba resists her suitor in a carriage. Shespeaks of what he calls her “fantasy world”. All of the dialogue is played backwards withaccommodating subtitles. (vdb)
Jem Cohen, Little Flags, 2000, video, 6:30
Cohen shot Little Flags in black and white on the streets of lower Manhattan duringan early-’90s military ticker-tape parade and edited the footage years later. The crowdnoises fade and Cohen shows the litter flooding the streets as the urban location looksprogressively more ghostly and distant from the present. Everyone loves a parade—except for the dead. (vdb)
Paul Chan, Untitled Video on Lynne Stewart and Her Conviction, The Law and Poetry,2006, video, 17:30
Untitled… is a video portrait of Lynne Stewart who was convicted of providing materialsupport for a terrorist conspiracy. She is the first lawyer to be convicted of aidingterrorism in the United States.. The video focuses on the relationship between thelanguage of poetry and the language of the law. Stewart speaks both languages, andemploys poetry as a “knotting point” to connect ideas of beauty and justice for juriesand judges alike. The film takes Stewart’s understanding of poetry and the law asa departure point to explore the possibilities of a poetics capable of articulating thepressures of terror and justice. (vdb)
Dara Greenwald with Ona Mirkinson, The Package, 2010, video, 12:00
This video explores questions concerning political repression by looking at the activityof militant care as expressed through writing, visiting, and advocating for political
prisoners.