Kate McCabe will showcase a decade’s worth of her moving image work implementing humor in experimental film, and premiere her latest 16mm work, You and I Remain. A film inspired by the Anthropocene, You and I Remain is an apocalyptic lullaby, a landscape film meditating on the end of the world. Shot in Big Sur, the Salton Sea, and McCabe’s own neighborhood of Joshua Tree, the film shows us a portrait of the world askew with subtle and moving sound design by Jason Payne of Nitzer Ebb.

Kate McCabe (American b. 1972) lives in the desert near the rock-n-roll heaven known as Joshua Tree, California, where she founded the art collective Kidnap Yourself. In Philadelphia, her youth was dominated by dance and art since she allegedly danced out of the womb. She is a graduate of Girls’ High and the University of the Arts, and obtained her MFA in Experimental Animation from the California Institute of the Arts under the innovative Jules Engel. She is an award-winning independent filmmaker who has shown films globally since 1995 in film festivals, galleries, and the occasional guerrilla drive-in. She is most renowned internationally for Sabbia, her first feature film, a visual album for stoner rock prince Brant Bjork. Her current work includes paintings, photography, short fiction, and art books. Her popular sketch comic book series Mojave Weather Diaries has produced four books and counting. McCabe has taught film at CalArts and UC San Diego and has worked with some of Los Angeles’ most prolific independent filmmakers including Eli Roth and Pat O’Neill.

“Kate McCabe’s works are funny and sweet personal observations of our twilight worlds. Worlds where portraits of places and emotions are the kinetic sublime–where we as viewers are transported betwixt and between, hovering–our feet grounded on earth, our heads in the clouds. The everyday scene, a moving lyrical event functioning as a tribute to beauty and our lucid spirit. These short films are like private conversations sharing a secret and a dream.”

See original program notes by Lindsay Needels.

PROGRAM:

Milk and Honey 16mm, color, sound, 15 mins, 2004
Darling 16mm on video, color, sound, 4 mins, 2011
Sabbia 16mm on video, color, sound, excerpt 15 min of 80, 2006
My Sweet 16mm on video, color, sound, 4 mins, 2013
Song for Pickles Super 8 on video, B&W, sound, 3 mins, 2013
You and I Remain 16mm, color, sound, 15mins, 2015
My Friend 16mm on video, color, sound, 7 mins, 2015
Portraits 16mm, color, sound, 8 min, 2001
There Are No Shadows in East Berlin digital video, color, sound, 10 mins, 2017

Total running time 82 minutes

Program notes: 

Milk and Honey: An experimental “home movie,” the film exposes the nature of light, love, and moon landings in the Promised Land of Southern California.

Kate: Moving to Los Angeles seemed to me like traveling to a remote planet and we were astronauts hovering within its borders, isolated in a strange sanctuary. Milk and Honey allows you to drift into that twilight world and dream of home.

Darling
The first in the three-part Love Letter Series, Darling is a letter from a woman to her paramour in which she describes her flaws, hoping they will bring them closer together.

Sabbia
A 15-minute excerpt from the feature-length visual album, a collaboration with desert rock musician Brant Bjork.

My Sweet 
The second film in the Love Letter Series, following Darling. A woman sincerely attempts to clear up an argument.

Song for Pickles
Testing a camera, fell in love, oh yeah and oh yeah.

You and I Remain 
In this portrait of a world askew, filmmaker McCabe composes an apocalyptic lullaby, a landscape film meditating on the end of the world and, subtly, the end of film as a medium. Incorporating time-lapse cinematography shot at the Salton Sea, Big Sur, and Joshua Tree, the film provides a canvas of empty and beautiful spaces with narration about the benefits of radiation with a plea to the viewer to preserve the message for the future.

My Friend 
The third and final installation of the Love Letter Series. This film is the breakup letter, where our dear French protagonist must lay it all on the table for a partner who “does not respect my bacon.”

Portraits 
37 kinetic portraits of friends and faces made completely in the dark, each 10 seconds in length. Aerobic animation captured on film with a beatbox experimental soundtrack.

There Are No Shadows in East Berlin
Made as part of an artist residency in the Lichtenberg neighborhood of East Berlin where the secret police had their headquarters. Utilizing time-lapse to study the urban landscape, this piece follows the light to peer into a shadowy past, grappling with the idea of shadow as surveillance, and celebrating that light and shadow traverse the city hand in hand.