Big Little Things: A Night Of Short Films

Big Little Things: A Night of Short Films curated by Carlos Valladares with Olivia Erlanger What does it mean to call a planet home? To answer this key question of Olivia Erlanger’s practice means that we have to shift scales, moving from the macro to the micro and back again. By engaging the concept of “planet home,” we experience a distortion that echoes throughout the artist’s work, which seamlessly shifts across mediums and proportions. In her exhibition Spinoff, Erlanger draws on film and television, creating a constellation of references that suggests how exactly the stories we tell ourselves shape our reality. Tex Avery, King Size Canary (1949, 8 min) This cartoon about dogs, cats, and mice illustrates what happens when one’s eyes are bigger than the stomach. Olivia Erlanger; Luis Ortega Govela, Garage (2019, 15 min) Three educational shorts expand on Erlanger’s and Ortega Govela’s art-historical and architectural research into the history of this overlooked space. Edward Owens, Remembrance: A Portrait Study (1967, 5 min) Owens shoots his mother, biding her time with friends. On how cozy memory specks can be reborn in cinema as a flowing present. Ernie Kovacs, Sketches from The Ernie Kovacs Special #7 (1961, 15 min) The landscape of 1950s U.S. television was sufficiently open enough for an intransigent, experimental, mad-man artist like Ernie Kovacs to emerge and wreak havoc on 50s pop ideas of conformity, morality, and domesticity. In this compilation of sketches from his legendary TV specials, Kovacs, the precursor to Monty Python and Andy Kaufman, shatters the myths of that most familiar of U.S. film genres, the Western. Chantal Akerman, Saute Ma Ville (1968, 13 min) Otherwise known as “Blow Up My Town,” Akerman’s tragicomic short shows you what happens when you lock an artist in her kitchen. Olivia Erlanger, Appliance (2024, 17 min) Riffing on the “final girl” trope, Erlanger’s film follows a woman undergoing egg retrieval and finding herself haunted by her appliances. Peggy Ahwesh, The Scary Movie (1993, 7 min) Sleepover, chez Ahwesh. Late at night, some girls act out all their fears for each other. Is your fear my fear? More Info below.