Events this Week of October

Gumball Gallery

You are invited to the Grand Opening of the Gumball Gallery this Thursday, October 2nd at 5pm in the front of the Studio Arts Building. This an interactive gallery housed in a toy capsule vending machine. Artists are invited to create work for the capsules and art enthusiasts are able to purchase work from the show by inserting 4 quarters into the machine. This Grand Opening Graduate Show features work by: Andy Moeller, Kristen Necessary, Theresa Moralez, Alison Filley, Lindsey Beal, Angela Dieffenbach, and Hannah Weinman. The show will be up in the gallery for the next few weeks if you miss the opening. Also if any of you or anyone you know wants to have a show in the gallery please let me know! It will be up all year with rotating exhibitions.
thanks,
Alison

Jennifer Montgomery, "Deliver," Friday October 3 8 PM

Please join the Department of Cinema & Comparative Literature in welcoming Chicago-based filmmaker Jennifer Montgomery this coming Friday, October 3rd at 8pm in 101 Becker Communication Studies Bldg. as she screens for the first time her film DELIVER, a remake of the 1972 classic film "Deliverance," featuring an all women cast on an extreme canoe trip down the Beaverkill River in the Catskill Mountains. DELIVER has its official world premiere later this month at the Brooklyn Arts Museum, so seeing it here for the first time will be a real treat, and Jennifer will answer questions about the film following our screening.

DELIVER
Like a generation of viewers, I was profoundly affected by Deliverance. But I have always been troubled by the hegemonic structures of gender proposed by Boorman and Dickey. Hence, my version is played by women: myself, Peggy Ahwesh, Jackie Goss, Su Friedrich, and Meredith Root, all experimental filmmakers who work as academics. While faithful to our respective male characters, we also play ourselves. Provocative questions arise through these filters of similarity and difference. My film’s title, Deliver, refers to the re-birthing experience of surviving extreme physical challenges, the product-obsessed nature of the film industry, and, of course, the fact that it is only women who can, biologically, truly deliver. Unlike the Deep South setting of Deliverance, Deliver takes place in the Catskill Mountains. The group goes canoeing down a river, which is, believe it or not, called the Beaverkill. We are confronted by two local women armed with a shotgun, and one of us is sodomized. This is the moment when a seemingly simple exercise in gender inversion becomes complicated. In the original, the iconic male hillbillies’ hostility toward bourgeois men is based largely on land entitlement. Few women can claim that history of entitlement, and the Catskills are not hillbilly country. Most importantly, there is the false notion that women do not pose a sexual threat to one another. What, then, motivates this rape? At what point do we read it as an unconvincing imitation of a “real” rape? The lines between bathos and pathos become dangerously blurred. It is the aim of this film to pose critical questions about the gendering of nature, homosocial sexual violence, and the act of filmmaking itself.

Film and video artist Jennifer Montgomery has been making independent, often highly personal work for the last two decades. Her work has been featured in festivals, galleries, and biennials around the world and also has received wider theatrical release. Widely respected in both the art world and the world of experimental cinema, Montgomery’s works vary in theme and format, from formal explorations of Super-8 to experimental features in HD. She is an Assistant Professor of the Moving Image at the University of Illinois at Chicago.