3/23/16 Kate McCabe

Kate McCabe will be showcasing a decade's worth of her moving image work combining humor in experimental film and premiering 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 mediating on the end of the world. Shot in Big Sur, the Salton Sea and in 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 where she allegedly danced out of the womb. She is a graduate of Girls’ High, the University of the Arts and she 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 both film festivals and galleries and the occasional guerrilla drive-in. She is most re-known 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 “Mojave Weather Diaries” has produced 4 books in the series 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. You can listen to her on radiofreejt.org every Friday night with her kitchen dance party show “Mojave Kitchen Dance Diaries.”

Program:
Milk and Honey ( 16mm color, sound, 15mins, 2004)
award winning 2004 short 16mm: 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 (16mm on video, color, sound 4 mins, 2011)
The first in the 3 part Love Letter Series, Darling is a letter
from a woman to her paramour where she describes her flaws,
hoping they will bring them closer together.
Music by J. R. Martin
Narration and Translation by Isa Loveless

Lies and Mendacity (video, color, sound, 1:30 min, 2006)
This is a gallery installation originally from film projections
done for a Devendra Banhart curated music festival at El Cid in
Los Angeles. Our emotions are bigger than us, uncontrollable like the sky and inevitable like the sunset.
Music by Bugs Salcido.

Growgirl (video animation, color, sound, 1:15min, 2011)
The book trailer for Heather Donahue's incredible memoir
"Growgirl".

Sabbia (Excerpt, 16mm on video, color, sound, 80 min, 2006)
A 15 minute excerpt from the feature length visual album, a
collaboration with desert rock musician Brant Bjork.

My Sweet (16mm on video, color, sound, 4 mins., 2013)
'My Sweet' is the second film in the Love Letter series
following 'Darling'. In this short film, a woman writes to her
lover in a sincere attempt to clear up an argument.

Song for Pickles (Super8 on video, black and white, sound, 3
mins. 2013) Testing a camera, fell in love, oh yea and oh yea.

You and I Remain (16mm, color, sound, 15mins, 2015)
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 timelapse 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 (16mm on video, color, sound, 7 mins., 2015)
The 3rd and final installation of the Love Letter Series. This
film is the break up letter, where our dear French protagonist must lay it all on the table for a partner that "does not respect
my bacon."
(bonus 16mm print Portraits (16mm, color sound, 8 min, 2001)
Total running time 75 minutes

“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.”