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My headache had extended into the tail end of Friday afternoon. It felt like someone was grinding their foot into the nerve behind my left eye (like putting out a cigarette). But I was eager to be walking towards the corner of St. Paul and 27th to check out the latest edition of New Works. Established in 2016, New Works is a screening series featuring video art and short films by Baltimore artists. Jimmy Joe Roche, Matt Sullivan, and Lydia Milano—all bright stars in the constellation of artists and programmers in Baltimore—are the ones who run the show. Over the years Jimmy and crew have cycled through venues like Current Space and the Red Room at Normal’s, but when 2640 Space hosts it just feels right.
Baltimoreans who have attended local film festivals in recent years will likely recognize some of the names above. New Works is open to showing work by established filmmakers and newcomers as well.
Each flyer for New Works lists the names of the filmmakers who will be featured in the program The names on the poster form a single column in the center, and they are always rendered in the same skittery handwriting on a blank white background. This time there were 17 names total, and as usual there was no other imagery to hint at what the content of the films might be. I recall feeling overwhelmed and excited by the variety on display the first time I attended New Works. If there’s anything consistent about the series it’s the return of that combination of feelings. Part of the fun of showing up is seeing the ways that Baltimore artists are accidentally on the same wavelength, though each artist finds a different method to poke and pry (often playfully) at thorny ideas and explore questions such as—What would it be like to die while inhabiting a fish’s body? What would death by volcano feel like? Gentle but thoughtful curation can be felt in the order that the films are presented, and moments of levity are perfectly situated.
Before the screening began, Cibo Matto songs and disintegrating chiptune tracks competed with audience background noise (a combination of chatter about various regional art scenes and the cracking open of beers). During introductory remarks by Jimmy and Matt, I took a moment to glance behind me and saw that nearly every row of folding chairs was full.
Films in the first half such as Luis Queral’s “Bird as Machine” and Demi Rutstein’s “Up Television Hill” established a recurring interest in compromised images. In “Bird as Machine” Queral pushes the limits of technology’s ability to render reality. This results in a poetic sequence towards the end during which the camera struggles to capture a fiery sunset. Layered images intrude upon one another in Rutstein’s “Up Television Hill.” Footage of streets under construction and radio towers cutting through the sky combine to form distorted views of familiar Baltimore locations.
The most literal manifestation of the compromised image theme arrived in the form of a short by Liz Flyntz titled “TV Toss”. It’s exactly what it sounds like. First you watch from below as a group of people toss a chunky television off the roof of a tall building, then you get to see from the TV’s point of view during its descent to the ground. “TV Toss” concludes with a satisfying crush. The guy sitting next to me finished his beer at this exact moment and offered his assessment: “siiick.”
Still from Corey Hughes’ “Whether the world be finite, whether there be more than one world…”
Charlie Knott’s “Vignettes For Thought And Getting Through It” and Jo Jovel’s “Flesh Eater” directly after embrace the challenge of tackling dense subject matter (grief and desire respectively). Knott’s film is mostly blue, with subtle shifts in color. Sometimes the blue is icy and other times saturated, deeper. Although a few images are immediately perceptible—a house, for example—most of the visual information in the film is fuzzy. The retreat from images in “Vignettes For Thought And Getting Through It” lightly pushed me towards paying close attention to the sound. The only way I can describe it is it made me feel like I was being held to someone’s chest while they softly sobbed.
Jovel’s “Flesh Eater” begins as almost a structural exercise à la Hollis Frampton’s film-as-still-life experiment featuring a lemon. “Flesh Eater” then proceeds to Andy Warhol territory—the focus shifts to watching someone eat (in this case, juicy oranges). When a hand with a prominent “♀♀” tattoo appears on screen to pry open the fruit, the film opens up too. It becomes less of an academic experiment and more of a sensorial one.
Flynn Octavia Leeb’s “Sleepwalker” starts off with a content warning (and a nod to the opening credits of David Lynch’s Lost Highway) and builds on the theme of investigating gooey textures, this time in the form of roadkill. Other films in the first half also emphasized texture, including a floaty music video by Jared Donovan Paolini (song: “Blood Knot,” band: Vulture Feather) which explores an abandoned house full of insulation foam, old newspapers, and hard crinkled tubes of paint.
Corey Hughes’s “Whether the world be finite, and whether there be more than one world,” was the first in a queue of shorts featuring artificial humans speaking directly to the viewer. In Hughe’s film we fly over imperfectly-scanned geographic locations (such as Mount Vesuvius) while a virtual man speaks in a calm, robotic voice about death, about becoming “clear, liquid, and light”. The dialogue is informed by Pliny the Elder’s writings to his son and the book Natural History which contains his theories about the makeup of the universe.
At the beginning of Albert Birney’s play-through of a fictional Sega CD game called “Tank Fantasy” we are greeted by a friendly virtual scientist. He guides viewers/players through a series of prompts—pick a colorful fish to embody, next choose a tank for your underwater experience. The accompanying music shares sonic DNA with the OST from video games like Ecco the Dolphin and convincingly earmarks “Tank Fantasy” as a relic from 1992.
One of the standout images of this iteration of New Works was of a skeletal robot hand reaching out to lightly touch a sheep’s wool. This image came from Marnie Ellen Hertzler’s short film which functions as a sneak peek at a longer work called Frog Hollow. The star of Frog Hollow is Francis, a humanoid robot, and in the excerpt shown at New Works she explains her presence within an Arcadian environment complete with fluffy sheep.
Clip from Matt Barry’s remixing of Alice Guy-Blaché’s “Serpentine Dance”
Matt Barry and Rohan Pathare broke up the second half with their rhythmic experiments using repurposed imagery of bodies in motion. For “Serpentine Dance” Barry remixed Alice Guy-Blaché’s famous footage of a dancer from 1897. As I watched my mind wandered and arrived at an altered version of a line from a Silver Jews song: She’s dancing so hard it looks like there are two of her. The pair of boxers in Pathare’s “Ravi S: Splash Page” face off with each other but also seem as though they are fighting their way out of inky darkness. Sometimes they appear as insubstantial figments, with midsections wiped out (as though a screen printed image failed to transfer completely). The content from “Serpentine Dance” and “Ravi S: Splash Page” coalesced with recollected fragments of figures from earlier in the night: a trembling hand reaching out into blown-out white space, a maniacal mouth with braces gleaming, a body hunched and drenched in blue. My brain felt like a swollen sponge at this point.
There is an informal networking component to New Works; when the lights come up the audience is encouraged to walk down the street to a nearby bar for post-screening conversation over drinks. I admittedly skipped this in favor of adding a sonic accompaniment to my evening.
During my walk over to Ottobar I thought about the different strategies filmmakers use to disarm unsettling images. I remembered a tonal shift in Shaawan Francis Keahna’s “Sink.” Keahna took a scene from George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and layered it with footage of grassy patches in a graveyard. When zombie and living human struggle, the result of the overlayed images is almost cute—the pair appear to be rolling around in the grass together. After an especially pulverizing week I appreciated moments like this, when films maneuvered out of dark territory towards something lighter. Even the last film of the night started with a bad date and concluded with a happy ending. The awkward creature in Julia Cooke’s “Big Exotic Bird” won over his secret crush and smooth jazz played as they flew away together.
Looking back, I could pinpoint exactly when the throbbing in my skull had resolved—the gentle pattering soundtrack paired with images of sticky, glazed fingers in “Flesh Eater” had snuffed out the remnants of my low-grade migraine. In a state of post-screening, post-headache afterglow I felt resensitized, and just in time for the late show. Bursts of inventive percussion and yelping fused with clouds of feedback during Credit’s energized, semi-improvised set. The crowd convulsed in response. I felt a wave of gratitude and relaxed my shoulders. An Artaud quote I had encountered earlier in the day came back to me: “The cinema is an amazing stimulant. It acts directly on the grey matter of the brain.”
Whether you are hoping for a medicinal benefit, seeking stimulation, supporting friends, or enjoy encountering the unexpected, New Works is worth checking out—once or many times. Anyone who lives in the Baltimore area can submit their video art or short film to New Works as long as you make an appearance at the screening. Showing up is what gives the scene a pulse.
