Heaven Gallery

Paris
The Heaven Cloud Will hover near the Eiffel Tower
Heaven Gallery presents Select Videos and premiere of the new Heaven DVD

Heaven in Paris
Septembre 10th, 2008
@
Caroline Breton
26 rue des tourelles
75020 paris
code A 1789
1er étage
+33 (1) 77 12 65 68

*please RSVP this is a small space
clara@heavengallery.com

Still from Chris Hefner's "Birdcatcher"

Heaven Gallery Screening Series Proudly Presents
The Experimental Comedy Video Show
Or the

“Superfuntasticexperimentalcomedyshortexplosion”

In the spirit of our experimental video series we thought that we would designate a night of experimental comedy videos. The artists in this show use experimental video technique and writing to produce pieces with a comedic edge. Post screening there will be a live performance by “Kill Comedy” a stand up comedy duo that aspires to perform live comedy but also to “kill” the standard stand up approach.
Video Screening & performance by Kill Comedy Saturday August 16th 2008 9pm $7 suggested donation.

Fresh from a four-day tour of St. Louis, MO., Kill Comedy is an anonymous standup duo in white sweat suits with “no jokes”. They present “a scientific study of the straight man/funny man dilemma”. “What is comedy?” they ask. Kill Comedy perform after the video screening.

Video Show Will Include Work By:
Ryan Trecartin
Paper Rad
Animal Charm
Eric Fensler
TV Sheriff
Jim Finn
Mike Finch
Leslie & The Lys
Bobby Ciraldo
Andrew Swant
Andrew Rosas
Dean Rank
Elisa Harkins
The Pretty Things
Rodney Ascher
ZZalgern0n
Ryan Kortman
Laura Klein
Ben Driggs
Catie Olsen
Keith Kolecki
Marc Riordan
Rich Szczepanski
Mike Miles
AD&D and Slow Kid
Marc Riordan
Ryan Brennan
Lyn Elliot
Paul Brittain

Video show curated by Clara Alcott & Keith Kolecki

Links & Information about artists
Ryan Trecartin
http://www.elizabethdeegallery.com/artists/view/ryan-trecartin
http://www.youtube.com/user/WianTreetin

www.paperrad.org
www.animalcharm.com

TV Sheriff
www.davyforce.com

www.jimfinn.org
www.prettythingsss.com

Sample of a video that is part of the show:
Kitty Concerto by Ryan Brennan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaREyRxYLFg

The Video Program is about 90 minutes with an intermission. Kill Comedy will perform for a half an hour. The videos will screen indoors in Heaven’s main gallery and on the back screening roof. Kill Comedy will also perform on the porch.

For more information contact (773) 983-6905 | Email: clara@heavengallery.com| Heaven Gallery 1550 N. Milwaukee 2nd Fl. Chicago, IL 60622

Heaven Proudly Presents
"The Very Small Drive-In"
Featuring the video performance work "Thrift Store Odyssey and the Whale." By Sean Samoheyl

Sean Samoheyl is a sculptural video artist with a love of Drive-In's and puppets. He combined his passions by building a interior –to scale drive in sculpture and he projects a video of his puppet show on the screen. Sean will also do live puppetry the night of the show. Video Puppet Screening on Friday September 26th, 2008 at 8pm. $7 Suggested donation

There will be a drive-in built inside the main gallery at Heaven Gallery complete with carved and painted wooden cars and a concessions stand. Sculpter and puppeteer Sean Samoheyl will project his video "The Thrift Store Odyssey and The Whale" on the drive-in screen. Samoheyl will perform puppetry in the videos and also live within the space. Sean performs using flat puppets in a small toy theater that is actually a chest mounted box that he wears as he improvises the stories. Sean performed many times over traveling across the U.S. in 2007 and 2008 using a basic story that was never the same twice. "The Whale" is about a boy who is part whale and wants to discover his roots. "The Thrift Store Odyssey", part autobiography, is about a young man who leaves the city in search of a more authentic life in a farm community. The video is culled from footage of Sean's tour with his traveling puppet theater

With the sculpture of the drive in Sean Samoheyl is revisiting the vague memories he has of drive-in theaters as a child. He also explores the social aspects of drive-ins. "I wanted the drive-in to have layers of history with no clear indication of what era it is. I wanted it to be both run down and beloved. The cars seem almost not to be able to move now that they've made it to the movie. They are the exhausted, prized possessions of their owners. I imagined the drive-in to be inhabited by steel mill workers and supermarket check-out workers. Muscle cars with primed replaced fenders that may never get painted to match the rest of the car. The family vans and wagons that remind us of a time when it seemed like oil would never run out, or that gas would not exceed a dollar a gallon, or two dollars for that matter. It's also an attempt to see a drive-in as a gathering, a weekly pageant. A sort of camp out that doesn't last very long. "-Sean Samoheyl

Sean Samoheyl is an artist living in a farm collective in rural Virginia called Twin Oaks Community. His work is informed by the many jobs he's involved in, such as forestry, making rope, childcare, weaving hammocks and making tofu. Sean moved to the farm from Chicago in 2001 where he worked as a bike messenger. Although Sean has had a life long interest in car culture and design, at 34 years old he has never owned car.

http://www.seansamoheyl.com/

Documentary by Maya Jensen $5 donation
Solidarity in Saya: An Afro-Bolivian Cultural Music Movement

Abstract:
This documentary examines the Afro-Bolivian urban youth movement of Saya music in La Paz, Bolivia that uses this traditional music to pursue their social and political needs. As migrants from villages in the rural, semi-tropical Yungas, this community of youths faces alienation in dealing with the foreign urban environment in which they also cope with racial discrimination on a daily basis. These urban youth build a supportive community around the Saya music group, which serves as a refuge from marginalization in mainstream Bolivian society. The social cohesion and unity cultivated within the Saya group has become a platform for political activism to confront the invisibility of the Afro-Bolivian minority. Rather than standing idle while the colonial hegemonic system of racial hierarchy defines them, the Afro-Bolivian Saya group members empower themselves by defining their own history and identity through these music performances. The Afro-Bolivian youths in La Paz use the musical expression of their history and identity to pursue their current goals of increased respect within society and official recognition by the state.

Columbia College MFA Music Composition for
the Screen students accompanying silent films from the
late 19th/20th century $5 donation

THE ACTUALITY SHOW
Fundamentals of Cinema in Tracking Shots, Nature and
Kissing (1893 - 1905).

With live musical accompaniment by students of
Columbia College's MFA Music Composition for the
Screen program.

'Actuality film': the crude, unorganized footage of a
real place, event, thing, etc., generally referring to
the first decade of cinema's creation, when filmmakers
weren't filmmakers but "operators" who captured nature
and the modern world using hand-cranked cameras.
Hovering between the mundane (workers leaving a
factory) and the extraordinary (President McKinley
makes a personal appearance), these fragments often
reveal inadvertent truths about the manipulations
inherent to both documentary and fiction filmmaking.
Actualities are thought of as static, grainy, boring,
primitive (Gorky's "Kingdom of Shadows"); taking a
closer look, they contain the ambition of a modern
cinema that finds virtue in the simple observation of
the world's splendor (contemporary masters such as Hou
Hsiao-hsien and Abbas Kiarostami come to mind).

THE ACTUALITY SHOW takes a look at three phenomenon of
actualities from 1893- 1905: the invention of the
tracking shot by mounting cameras to trains and other
movable machinery; the unpredictable, astonishing
presence of nature and wildlife that found its way
into the early cinema frame as a testament to the
power of documentary; and the human kiss as an
electrifying presentiment of the potential of a new
art form to inspire love and change.

Original music composed and performed by:
Elon Arbiture
Jordan Balagot
Duncan Blickenstaff
Joseph Cooper
Mae Crosby
Andrew Edwards
Victor Hernandez-Sumpfhauser
Robert Ramos
Marjorie Rusche
Nathaniel Smith
Michelle Tyler

Program runs approximately 90 minutes with brief
pauses between films. DVD projection.