[-empyre-] Welcome to Week 3: Constanza Salazar, Rachel Fein-Smolinski Lynne Sachs (US)

[Renate Ferro]

Thanks so much Tim Murray and Ana Valdes for helping us through week 2 especially with your personal interactions with Grace and Agnes. 

Welcome to the 3rd week of our discussion, Between the Body, Memory, Screen and Culture, and the lives of Grace Quintanilla, Barbara Hammer, Carolee Schneemann, Agnes Varda. This week we welcome three guests: Constanza Salazar, Rachel Fein-Smolinski, and  Lynne Sachs. Tim and I have known Lynne and her work and we are thrilled she is joining us this month.  Welcome to new subscribers Constanza and Rachel.  We look forward to hearing from you all as well as our subscribers and those of you lurking. 
Biographies are below.

Just a note to all of our subscribers that when I conceived of this month’s topic in light of the loss of these artists I also hoped that many of you would talk about your own work, how you are influenced by these artists, and how their content has informed not only your work but also perhaps your life, politics, and ideas.  Thanks to all of you.  Renate
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Constanza Salazar's research focuses on expanding the traditional boundaries of the discipline of art history by incorporating new interdisciplinary theoretical paradigms that explore the intimate relationship between new media art, philosophy and critical theory. 
Her current work includes renegotiating the concepts of identity, embodiment, affect, and performance to uncover new ways of conceptualizing "the body" and "otherness" in relation to space, and borders, via technology, especially tactical media, towards the possibility of resistance.
Salazar completed her schooling in Canada. She holds a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Waterloo, and completed her M.A. in Art History at the University of Guelph. Salazar has presented papers internationally which examine the theories of new materialism, new ontology, and posthumanism within contemporary art and critical theory.

Rachel Fein-Smolinski is an artist based in Syracuse, NY who works in photography, video, and installation. She was raised in Buffalo, NY and holds a B.F.A. in Studio Art from the San Francisco Art Institute and an M.F.A. in Art Photography from Syracuse University where she is currently a part-time faculty member. Her work uses sci-fi and adopts the authoritative aesthetics of biology and medicine to deal with courage and pain through the saving graces of neurosisand intellectualism. Fein-Smolinski has exhibited internationally and is the recipient of numerous awards, residencies, and publications, including the 2019 Visual Studies Workshop residency, 2018 Wynn Newhouse Award, the Silver Eye Center for Photography’s Fellowship 19 International Award Honorable Mention, the 2018 John Chervinsky Memorial Fellowship, the 2016 Constance Saltonstall Fellowship in Ithaca, New York and the Berlin Fall Semester Residency at Haubrok Foundation. She has been published in Oranbeg Press, and Photo Emphasis. Her most recent video Referred Pain was shown in the Video in America exhibition at The Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY, and will be shown in a forthcoming exhibition at SPACES in Cleveland, OH. She has shown at the Griffin Museum of Photography, and has forthcoming exhibitions at the Louise and Bernard Palitz Gallery, SUNY Upstate Medical University Health Sciences Library, and the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art. Fein-Smolinski is currently the Digital Services Coordinator at Light Work Community Darkrooms.

Lynne Sachs makes films, installations, performances and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with every new project.  Lynne discovered her love of filmmaking while living in San Francisco where she worked closely with artists Bruce Conner, Ernie Gehr, Gunvor Nelson, Barbara Hammer, Craig Baldwin and Trin T. Min-ha.
 
Lynne’s recent work embraces a hybrid form combining the non-fiction, experimental and fiction modes. In the words of NYC artist Kelly Spivey, “Lynne allows her real film ‘characters’ to explore storytelling from various subjectivities, various selves and other-selves, opening up, perhaps ironically, a more authentic portrayal of being alive during a specific time, in a specific situation or place. We learn that to burrow down into our ability to imagine another’s pain or joy, and then to perform these as part of our own exploration for the camera, yields a deeper intimacy than if we’d simply ‘told the truth.’ Lynne Sachs’s work can best be epitomized by her interests in intimacy, collaboration and space.”  Both Your Day is My Night (2013) and The Washing Society (2018) are hybrid films that evolved from two-year New York City performance tours.
 
Sachs has made over 25 films which have screened at the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival and Toronto’s Images Festival among others. They have also been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, Walker Art Center, Wexner Center for the Arts and other venues nationally and internationally. The Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana and the China Women’s Film Festival have all presented retrospectives of Sachs’ films. Lynne received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts.  She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband filmmaker Mark Street. Together, they have two daughters, Maya Street-Sachs and Noa Street-Sachs. In 2018, Lynne was a visiting lecturer in the Visual Arts program at Princeton University.




Renate Ferro
Visiting Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of Art
Tjaden Hall 306
rferro at cornell.edu