Ellen Cantor: If I Just Turn and Run

EAI is pleased to present a program of moving image work by Ellen Cantor (1961-2013), whose multimedia art practice advanced bold new feminist representations of sexuality and empowerment. In these diaristic and intimate pieces, Cantor deftly uses the medium of video to appropriate, re-dub, and reframe imagery from such diverse sources as Antonioni, Disney cartoons, John Cassavetes, porn, and classic horror films. Key works, including Evokation of My Demon Sister (2002), Remember Me (1998), and Within Heaven and Hell (1996), will be screened, along with the rarely-seen video If I Just Turn and Run (1998), which was recently rediscovered in Cantor's archive. This event also launches EAI's distribution of a selection of Cantor's moving image work.

This event is part of a series of concurrent exhibitions, public programs, and screenings featuring the work of Ellen Cantor, scheduled throughout Fall 2016. Exhibitions will take place at 80WSE Gallery, Maccarone, Participant Inc., and Foxy Production, with public programs hosted by Skowhegan and the world premiere of Cantor's film Pinochet Porn (2008-2016) at The Museum of Modern Art. This unprecedented collaboration between organizing venues and the Estate of Ellen Cantor seeks to open dialogue surrounding Cantor's multifaceted and groundbreaking work.

Wednesday, October 5, 2016 6:30pm Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) 535 West 22nd Street, 5th Fl. New York, NY 10011 www.eai.org Admission $7, Students $5 Free for EAI Members RSVP: info@eai.org

Beginning with her very first moving image work, Madame Bovary's Revenge (1995), this program traces the course of Cantor's video practice, before the planning of what would become her final work, the feature-length film Pinochet Porn (2008-2016). In Madame Bovary's Revenge, Cantor already displays the masterly use of appropriated footage for which she would become known, seamlessly inserting explicit scenes from the classic porn film Behind the Green Door (1972) into key scenes of lovemaking from Louis Malle's 1959 succès de scandale The Lovers. This critical and disarmingly candid repurposing of media images of female sexuality, disempowerment, and empowerment would be further developed in subsequent videos. Remember Me combines Antonioni, Aldrich, and Cassavetes to powerful effect; Within Heaven and Hell, one of Cantor's most celebrated works, is an iconic mash-up of The Sound of Music (1965) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) ; Evokation of My Demon Sister pays tribute to Kenneth Anger and harnesses the feminist energies latent in Brian DePalma?s Carrie (1976); and Bambi?s Beastly Buddies (2004) continues Cantor's appropriation of fairy tale imagery, setting the unspoiled innocence of Disney against a contemporary backdrop of violence. Added to and threaded throughout much of these videos are diaristic, startlingly intimate stories from Cantor's own life. Never before screened, If I Just Turn and Run takes the form of a video diary, offering a rare view of Cantor telling these stories in front of the camera.

Born in Detroit, Ellen Cantor (1961-2013) lived and worked in London and New York City. Cantor received a Bachelor of Arts from Brandeis University (MA) in 1983 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (ME) in 1991. Cantor had exhibited internationally, with exhibitions and screenings at Cabinet, London; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco; Feigen Gallery, Chicago; ICA Artists' Film Biennial, London; Kunstverein, Salzburg; Participant, Inc., New York City; Postmasters, New York City; Serpentine Gallery, London; and Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, among many others.  


ELLEN CANTOR EXHIBITIONS AND PUBLIC PROGRAMS

Ellen Cantor: Are You Ready For Love?
Wednesday, September 7 - Saturday, November 12, 2016
80WSE Gallery | NYU
80 Washington Square East New York, NY 10003
steinhardt.nyu.edu/80wse

Ellen Cantor: Are You Ready For Love? focuses on Cantor's sustained investment in narrative and more specifically her appropriation and alteration of existing female protagonists as a means of autobiography. The exhibition presents a wide range of drawings, including monumental wall-size works on canvas, hand drawn books and works on paper, Cantor's iconic video Within Heaven and Hell, and an installation combining the storyboards and segments of her film Pinochet Porn.

Coming To Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-Plicit Art by Women
Organized by Pati Hertling and Julie Tolentino
Friday, September 9 ? Sunday, October 16, 2016
Maccarone
630 Greenwich Street and 98 Morton Street
New York, NY 10014
maccarone.net

Maccarone has re-staged the landmark feminist exhibition Coming To Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-Plicit Art by Women, curated by Cantor at David Zwirner Gallery in 1993, which featured 25 seminal artists, including Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, Nicole Eisenman, Zoe Leonard, Marilyn Minter, Lorraine O'Grady, Yoko Ono, and Hannah Wilke, among others. As a new iteration of Coming to Power, in dialogue with the themes of the original exhibition, Pati Hertling and Julie Tolentino have co-curated a performance program from a new generation of artists, including Niv Acosta, Jim Fletcher, FlucT, Xandra Ibarra/La Chica Boom, Kia Labeija, and Narcissister.

ELLEN CANTOR at Foxy Production
Sunday, September 11 ? Sunday, October 23, 2016
Foxy Production
2 East Broadway, #200
New York, NY 10038
foxyproduction.com

Foxy Production presents Cantor's multi-channel video installation Be My Baby (1999), comprising three screens of appropriated images, including excerpts from independent American cinema and clips of space travel. In Be My Baby, Cantor's ongoing and passionate exploration of tragedy and its transcendence is further expressed as a response to a series of lectures by Rudolf Steiner titled The Manifestations of Karma, which addresses accidents, death, illness, and synchronistic encounters. The installation is accompanied by a series of photographic works from 1997, each of which consists of grids of repeated 3x5 inch snapshot photographs that were shot by Cantor from a TV screen playing scenes of people kissing in old black-and-white Hollywood movies. These works move Cantor?s investigation of the portrayal women and love in classic cinema in to the space of photography.

Ellen Cantor, Lovely Girl's Emotions
Sunday, September 18 - Sunday, October 30, 2016
PARTICIPANT INC
253 East Houston Street
New York, NY 10002
participantinc.org

Participant presents paintings and sculptures which pre-date and lay groundwork for the concerns that permeate the bodies of work in drawing and video for which Cantor became best known. The subjects that populate Cantor's paintings often include women engaged in fantasy sequences involving animals that act like people, flight, and states of ecstatic celebration. Cantor's totemic sculptural works, assemblages of carved and painted wood, and found objects including bells and smashed cans, are reminiscent of ancient female power figures, including the Venus of Willendorf, also paying homage to the works of Louise Bourgeois, while pointing to Cantor's move into the transformation of appropriated materials as a strategy for empowerment.

"Mine Are 'True' Love Stories..."
September - November 2016
136 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011
skowheganart.org/events/

From September through November 2016, Skowhegan will host a series of public programs organized by Natasha Marie Llorens, which engage critically with each of the concurrent presentations of Cantor's work, offering a more expansive look at her practice and international peer group. Skowhegan's New York programs are supported in part by a grant from the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Inc.

Modern Monday: Ellen Cantor's Pinochet Porn
Monday, October 31, 2016 | 7:00pm
Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2
The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
New York, NY 10019
moma.org

This event will premiere Pinochet Porn (2008-16), followed by a discussion between Lia Gangitano, Founding Director of Participant Inc.; filmmaker John Brattin; and Stuart Comer, Chief Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art at MoMA.

Forthcoming Publication
Cantor's film Pinochet Porn will be the subject of a forthcoming publication of the same title, drawing on the work, approach, collaborations, and friendships integral to the process of making the film. The book brings together contributions by Dodie Bellamy, Jonathan Berger, Ellen Cantor, John Cussans, Lia Gangitano, Joseph Grigely, and editors Fatima Hellberg and Jamie Stevens. Pinochet Porn is published by Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Sternberg Press, and scheduled to be released in Spring 2017.

The Estate of Ellen Cantor
Inquiries regarding the multi-venue collaboration and the Estate of Ellen Cantor should be directed to Lia Gangitano.

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About EAI
Celebrating our 45th anniversary in 2016, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is a nonprofit arts organization that fosters the creation, exhibition, distribution, and preservation of moving image art. A New York-based international resource for media art and artists, EAI holds a major collection of over 3,500 new and historical media artworks, from groundbreaking early video by pioneering figures of the 1960s to new digital projects by today's emerging artists. EAI works closely with artists, museums, schools and other venues worldwide to preserve and provide access to this significant archive. EAI services also include viewing access, educational initiatives, extensive online resources, technical facilities, and public programs such as artists' talks, screenings, and multi-media performances. EAI's Online Catalogue is a comprehensive resource on the artists and works in the EAI collection, and features expansive materials on media art's histories and current practices: www.eai.org

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EAI's Public Programs are supported in part by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. EAI also receives program support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.