THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: "The Vortex We Made When We Fell, or so the story goes” (Oct. 10-Oct. 16)

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The Vortex We Made When We Fell, or so the story goes

Description
As a recursive, never completed practice of genre subversion, the work belongs somewhere in the middle, in the void, in the failed attempt to pin down some objective reality. The video was collaborative, improvised and completed in one take. I provided performers with costumes, a location and a prompt. A couple lives in a haunted house and is visited by a priest who attempts to exorcise the home. We subjected cliches to reality and saw what happens when real people do their best to negotiate an unfamiliar circumstance. The house played an important role as it represented an iconic cliche and a part of the colonial imaginary. Researching the house I learned that, although built in the 18th century, it had been renovated to look more modern, then stripped again, in later years, to look original. However its lost original furnishings were replaced with fake and decontextualized period objects. The house itself became the exercise in memory I attempted to tell through the story. An eternal recurrence, a recycling of memory with no end or definite beginning and no concrete reality.

Runtime: 12 minutes, 58 seconds
Best Viewed: Cinema Presentation

Director Biography - Holly Rae Harrell is a Los Angeles based video and performance artist originally from upstate New York. She completed her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in 2020 and hold a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2015 she received a grant from the Roger Brown Study Collection to re-enact tours of the White House as Jackie O at different vernacular art environments throughout the Midwest as well as junkyards and grocery stores. She’s performed at Dfbrl8r and Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago and have participated in screenings throughout New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and internationally. In Los Angeles she has performed and exhibited at MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Cirrus Gallery, Human Resources, Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, Anat Ebgi Gallery and Sebastian Gladstone Gallery as well as different project spaces. Harrell received the REEF residency and grant with a collaborator in 2020 where they used their awarded funds to develop a research journal on how the presentation of fiction as fact, in traditional media, plays a role in the production of our social realities. Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA) acquired this journal and facilitated a joint release event and panel discussion. This past summer she attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in rural Maine and followed that up with her second performance series at Human Resources. Most recently, Harrell wrote and directed The Darkest Valley, a performance project at Sebastian Gladstone Gallery. A large- scale cooling tower sculpture was built in the gallery space as a part of the performance.

Credits & Specifications:
Completion Date: August 20, 2024
Production Budget: 200 USD
Country of Origin: United States
Country of Filming: United States
Shooting Format: Digital
Aspect Ratio: 1280 x 720