YBCAlive! George Kuchar & Miguel Calderon

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Sat, Nov 21 thru
Sat, Dec 5 2009
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Tropical Vulture is a cross-generational project which highlights the artistic influences between Bay Area artist George Kuchar, a Bay Area legend of independent filmmaking, and Mexican artist Miguel Calderón. The exhibition features an experimental narrative video titled Conversations with a Tropical Vulture. The exhibition features a preview of the feature length film Conversations with a Tropical Vulture which will premiere at YBCA in the Fall of 2010. The film, scripted by both artists with Calderón as the director and Kuchar in the role of lead actor, blends Hollywood glamour and drama with an all too real-life approach, which creates and inspires a counterpoint of unattainable desire against unbearable actuality. Shot on location in Acapulco, the film utilizes a "low-fi" aesthetic and playful use of non-professional actors. Photographs and sculptures related to this commissioned project and earlier videos made by each artist will also be on view including the US premiere of Calderón’s latest video Best Seller and the world premiere of Kuchar’s Burrito Bay, a video diary about the making of Tropical Vulture.

While the artists are in residence at YBCA, a series of artist talks are planned, moderated by both Calderón and Kuchar, with Bay Area video and filmmakers. All events free with gallery admission

Sam Green Lecture
Sat, Nov 21, 2–4 pm • Gallery 3
As part of Miguel Caldéron and George Kuchar's Tropical Vulture lecture series, join Academy Award nominated film maker Sam Green as he lectures and performs several personal key moments—based in film and visual and performance art that relate to influences within his own film practice.

Artists Forum
Sat, Nov 28, 2–4 pm • Screening Room
A conversation with George Kuchar and screening of Secrets of the Shadow World, a video based on the recently deceased ufologist, John Keel, which features his theories about paranormal musings. The screening is a tribute and a rare opportunity for those interested in this subject and author to see and hear him expound his views on film.

Live Video Taping
Thu, Dec 3, 6–8 pm & Sat, Dec 5, 2-4 pm • YAAW Lounge
As part of Miguel Caldéron and George Kuchar's Tropical Vulture, join live video tapings that offer gallery visitors the opportunity to perform from scripts in progress and participate in a new video project by George Kuchar and film students from The San Francisco Art Institute.

FREE admission with your Big Idea Night button

RELATED EVENTS

Nov 21, 2009–Jan 17, 2010: PAUSE :: Tropical Vulture

George Kuchar

George Kuchar is one of the legends of independent filmmaking. Beginning as a teenager in the 1950s with his twin brother Mike, Kuchar directed movies which upended Hollywood melodramas into small-scale epics, noted for their creative low-budget effects, over-the-top plots, eye-popping performances by their cast of friends, and titles like Sins of the Fleshapoids, Color Me Shameless and Lust for Ecstasy. Kuchar’s classic film Hold Me While I’m Naked is beloved by several generations of fans and filmmakers, and was voted one of the 100 best films of the 20th century by the critics of the Village Voice. In the mid-1980s, Kuchar turned to video making, and created what is possibly the largest single collection (160) of video diaries. This ongoing chronicle of the artist’s life is called "unique in film history" by the scholar Gene Youngblood. In Kuchar's video universe, nothing is safe from the camera expanding his oeuvre to exploiting his morbid interests and notorious insecurities with his token razor-sharp sense of humor in classics like The Mongreloid and The Weather Diaries.—Kuchar’s friendships, lusts, anxieties, fears, and bodily functions are all addressed onscreen, often accompanied by his outrageously funny commentary. And yet below the witty surface lie profound and moving meditations on human existence. Kuchar’s films influenced generations of filmmakers, starting with Andy Warhol and John Waters. Often referred to as Kuchar's 1965 masterpiece, Hold Me While I'm Naked is one of the all-time classics of DIY cinema. With 50 years Kuchar’s ever-expanding (200+ and growing) oeuvre of video work behind him, Kuchar has become a seminal figure in underground cinema.

George Kuchar is associate professor in the Film department. His film and video work has been screened internationally, and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Worldwide Video Festival First-Prize Award, the Los Angeles Film Critics Award, and the Maya Deren Award for Independent Film and Video Artists from the American Film Institute, and others. He also contributed to the underground comic book, Arcade, for which he created a biography of H.P. Lovecraft. Kuchar's recent major work, Secrets of the Shadow World, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Miguel Calderón

Miguel Calderón is a Mexican artist, and writer. He is best known for his work titled Aggressively Mediocre/Mentally Challenged/Fantasy Island (circle one) which was part of a 1998 exhibit and was bought by Wes Anderson and shown in the film The Royal Tenenbaums. He received his BFA at the San Francisco Art Institutein 1994. He has worked in paint, photography, video and installations. Much of Calderón's work has been called "low-brow" and that he "has a knack for pushing crass stereotypes and clichés to absurd and provocative extremes." An article in Sculpture magazine called him "something of an international phenom, " and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art called him "[t]he enfant terrible of contemporary art in Mexico.” Within his art practice Calderón attempts to explore contemporary Mexican culture from a globalized perspective and from a point of view that simultaneously underlines the intense dialogue with its canonical predecessors that characterizes it and the international landscape to which it also belongs. His work ahs been shown at Tamayo Contemporary Art Museum in Mexico City, Andrea Rosen Gallery in NewYorkCity, the Museum of Natural History in Mexico City , 2004 Såo Paulo Biennale, Guggenheim Museum, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, The P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York City, Sharjah Biennale, Yokahama Triennale and the 2006 Busan Biennale, and had a film commissioned for the Freize Art Fair in London and Centre Pompidou in Paris.

YBCA - Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

YBCAlive! George Kuchar & Miguel Calderon

George Kuchar

Miguel Calderón

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