Summoned

Lana Z Caplan | Gloria Chung | Abinadi Meza | Mike Rollo

December 14, 2024 to January 11, 2025

A program of artists’ films that convoke elemental spirits and the power of nature in a time of human-made catastrophe—a command for light against impending darkness. Four filmmakers consider primordial phenomena and current crises, summoning intangible forces of creation to counter the destruction of the natural world. Ancient energies are captured and released, bookended by the words of the late Steve Albini: “This is a real goddamn emergency!”

Viewable above and in the Deluge transom window (dusk to midnight).

Eidolon

Mike Rollo, 2020, 4 min

The seer passes beneath branches, crosses fields, observes the quiet corners of creation. Bright and dark take turns showing their faces, a two-sided phantasm, one energy shape-shifting through time. The seer makes note, gleans eidolons.

Mike Rollo’s photochemical practice explores alternative approaches to non-fiction cinema. Mike’s films are place-based, focusing on landscape, rural industry and communication cultures, with ecological thinking and mindfulness of the shifts, conflicts and negotiations to themes of obsolescence, age and decay. Mike teaches film production at the University of Regina.

Ommatidia

Gloria Chung, 2022, 7 min

Each compound eye of a large dragonfly is composed of up to 30,000 ommatidia. Each ommatidium collects visual information through photoreceptors, and together the thousands of ommatidia help form a mosaic image in the dragonfly’s brain. These images of images—taken from hundreds of Icelandic Road and Coastal Administration webcams—form a mosaic record of light, time and physical/psychic landscapes.

Gloria Chung's films explore places “not down in any map”; liminal places defined by time, light and memory. Her films have screened at festivals and galleries in the USA and internationally. Born in Detroit, she currently lives and works in New York.

Tláloc (Lines Drawn in Water)

Abinadi Meza, 2023, 9 min

An enigmatic otherworld where hues of water evolve into prismatic blooms. Tláloc is the water god of rain, fertility and storms in the Aztec pantheon, and the lord of the drowned.

Abinadi Meza is a Latinx-Indigenous (Otomí) artist primarily working with sound, moving image, performance and installation to create environments where perception and memory become tactile and vivid. He has exhibited and screened work at Antimatter (Victoria), Bogotá Experimental Film Festival, Brooklyn Film Festival, Cineteca Nacional de México, Festival ECRÃ (Rio de Janeiro), Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), Mexic-Arte Museum (Austin), New Orleans Film Festival, Public Art Fund (New York) and Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus( among other places.

Patches of Snow in July

Lana Z Caplan, 2017, 8 min

Mythology and religious fanaticism, climate deniers and environmental profiteers, natural disasters and the end of radio, all reflected in the mirror of a morphing landscape, poised for new devastation.

Lana Z Caplan makes experimental films, photographs and installations. Her projects are inspired by the intersection of history and the contemporary, with a focus on environmental and social justice topics. Her recent photographic monograph, Oceano (for seven generations) published by Kehrer Verlag in 2023, contrasts the historic inhabitants of California’s Oceano Dunes—Indigenous Chumash and depression-era artist and mystic squatters—with the current ATV riding community that is the source of a public health crisis in neighbouring communities. Her work has been exhibited and screened in solo and group exhibitions in cities around the world including Beijing, New York, San Francisco, San Juan, Edinburgh, Mexico City, Philadelphia, Boston, Edinburgh, New Delhi, Tel Aviv, Valparaiso and Barcelona. Caplan is currently an Associate Professor of Photography and Video at Cal Poly, in San Luis Obispo.