An afternoon gallery talk by artist Elisabeth Subin will be offered at The Jewish Museum on Monday, November 8 at 1 pm. Ms. Subrin will talk about the current exhibition, Shulie: Film and Stills by Elisabeth Subrin. The gallery talk is FREE with admission to The Jewish Museum. The Jewish Museum is located at Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, Manhattan.
Shulie (1997, 37 min.) is a shot-by-shot remake of a little-known documentary about 1960s feminist Shulamith Firestone. Author of the treatise The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, Firestone was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1967 when four male directors selected her as a subject for a film about the so-called Now Generation. Shot in the style of direct cinema, the original Shulie featured Firestone discussing religion, the limitations of motherhood, and racial and class issues in the workplace. Thirty years later, Elisabeth Subrin recreated Shulie using actors in many of the original locations. The resulting film is a nostalgic and somewhat cynical reflection on the legacy of second-wave feminism. Subrin writes, "in the compulsion to remake, to produce a fake document, to repeat a specific experience I never actually had, what I have offered up is the performance of a resonant, repetitive, emotional trauma that has yet to be healed." This gallery talk is part of The Jewish Museum's Artist Talk series presented in conjunction with the exhibition, Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism.
Shulie also features four new digital color photographs of enlarged film stills from Shulie, two of which are being shown for the first time. These photographs allow the viewer to focus on thematic details of the protagonist's activities (commuting to work, creating art), as well as on formal details including 16mm film grain and video scanlines. Similar to the way Subrin's film inhabits the area between reality and fantasy, her highly mediated printing methods involve a complex layering of analog and digital techniques.
Elisabeth Subrin's award-winning work has screened widely in the US and abroad, including in solo shows at P.S.1, The Museum of Modern Art, The Vienna International Film Festival, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Harvard Film Archives,
Sue Scott Gallery, and The San Francisco Cinematheque; and in group shows and festivals at The Whitney Biennial, The
Guggenheim Museum, The Walker Art Center, The Wexner Center for the Arts, The New York Film Festival, and The Rotterdam International Film Festival. She has received grants and fellowships from the Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Annenberg, and The Creative Capital Foundations, and participated in
The Sundance Institute Screenwriting and Directing Fellowships with her first feature-length narrative film, in development with Forensic Films in New York. She has received film commissions from The MacDowell Colony and The Danish
Arts Council for recent projects, The Caretakers and Sweet Ruin. A solo exhibition curated by Lia Gangitano will take place at PARTICIPANT, INC. in New York in 2011. Ms. Subrin's new installation, Lost Tribes and Promised Lands (2010), is currently on view at MoMA/PS1's exhibition, Greater New York. She is currently Assistant Professor of Film and Media Art at Temple University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Located on the third floor of The Jewish Museum, the Goodkind Media Center houses a digital library of radio and television programs from the Museum's National Jewish Archive of Broadcasting (NJAB). It also features a changing exhibition space dedicated to video and new media. Using computer workstations, visitors are able to search material by keyword and by categories such as art, comedy, drama, news, music, kids, Israel, and the Holocaust.
Media programs are made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency.
