Interview with filmmaker Chris Hefner

http://notesandboltspodcasts.blogspot.com/2012/09/033-chris-hefner-director-of-pink-hotel.html   Newly released interview with Chris Hefner, director of The Poisoner. I play "the Husband" in The Poisoner

Reversible Eye Gallery to Preview Ambitious Residency Projects at California Avenue Art Haunt

Renowned as a beacon for avant-garde art since 2005, Chicago’s Reversible Eye Gallery is further expanding its repertoire by hosting its first 8-month long artist residencies with a public preview to take place on October 31, 2012 and November 3, 2012 as part of the California Avenue Art Haunt. Reversible Eye’s founder R.K. Shuquem is using the maiden residencies as an opportunity to strengthen the bonds between the artists and the gallery, allowing them a studio space to create striking art. The initial residencies focus on the diverse works of Heather Lynn, Samantha Acosta, and Shuquem himself.

Fans of Chicago-based artist Heather Lynn recognize her as the mastermind behind the multi-faceted experience Pure Magical Love, which Lynn herself describes as, “a girl masquerading as an army of girls masquerading as a congregation masquerading as a myth masquerading as a dance masquerading as a band.” Like a Maryoshka doll of fine arts, Lynn reveals a myriad of artistic facets in her projects with talents running the gamut including story composition, set design, costume design, choreography, and musical composition. Lynn’s work renders boundaries obsolete, featuring diverse endeavors such as the design of a room in a haunted house infused with her unique vision, erecting a holy monument within a church, and orchestrating a “neobaroque ballet”. For her residency at the Reversible Eye Gallery, Lynn is composing, directing, and choreographing a rock opera to debut at the close of her residency in Spring 2013.

Samantha Acosta’s work aims to find a balance between resistance and resignation of the social mores of sexuality. Her body of work primarily consists of a myriad of self-portraits, each expressing a different facet of sexual conflict, overcoming or submitting to the piece’s provocative theme. The title of each piece purposefully draws awareness to humanity’s voyeuristic nature, never criticizing, never condoning, never ignoring. Acosta has often employed photography in her art and has collaborated with many artists on a variety of projects in the mediums of photography and film. During her residency at the Reversible Eye Gallery, she intends to continue confronting the barriers of parallel sexual dimensions that co-exist and overlap, yet rarely touch. Acosta plans on using her residency to challenge herself with unfamiliar mediums such as sculpture and mixed media combined with her experience in photography and video to discover new vistas of her vision that have yet to be navigated.

In addition to his intensive work as founder of the Reversible Eye Gallery, Chicago-based multimedia artist R.K. Shuquem is well known for his work with unpredictably infamous musical projects like California synth punks The Phantom Limbs, Chicago gonzo marching band Mucca Pazza, and his own erratic and chaotic Loto Ball Show. With unwavering devotion to the arts, Shuquem became Artistic Director for the Illinois-based non-profit organizationThe Arts of Life, Inc. which encourages the creative work of artists, with and without disabilities, within the community. Shuquem’s ambitious residency focuses on the design of four albums for a yet-to-be-formed black metal band called Pantocon. Working in reverse, Shuquem will begin by designing artwork for all four Pantocon albums, titled Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, before composing the music, with the project finally culminating into the actual formation of the band, Pantocon. While the entire scope of the project is anticipated to take 3 years, the artwork for all four albums is expected to be on display at the Reversible Eye Gallery for the residency’s major exhibit on March 30, 2013. Influenced by the elaborate DIY packaging of Crass Records’ artists, each of Pantocon’s albums will feature maddeningly detailed fold-out posters while each album’s cover will be on display as 5.5 foot x 5 foot intricately penned ink pieces. Shuquem plans to explore themes of surveillance, self-consciousness, and God throughout the process of the Pantocon Project.

You can marvel at the foundation stones of Heather Lynn’s rock opera, Samantha Acosta’s multimedia exploration of sexual mores, and R.K. Shuquem’s Pantocon Project on October 31, 2012 as part of the California Avenue Art Haunt with an encore viewing scheduled for November 3, 2012.

New Press for Arts of Life Band

FIRST REVIEW!! we've had press, but never a press testimonial.. and this one is really super. THANKS! http://www.chicagoinnerview.com/index.php/2012/08/25/the-arts-of-life-band-2/ As a fearless joint effort between disabled and non-disabled Chicago artists, The Arts of Life Band has shown the power that music has to unite on an instinctual level over the last six years. Although their sound spans a variety of genres from guitar-driven pop to rap to psychedelic jams, as a whole they display the kind of blunt enthusiasm and lack of pretension that defines what it means to be punk rock. Having performed at a variety of venues around town (including the North Coast Festival), the band is very familiar with putting on an expert show and often welcomes other Chicago musicians to join in the festivities. Far more than just an outlet or healing tool for its members, The Arts of Life Band is an assembly of skilled and engrossing performers offering an original perspective on life, and musicianship to boot. –text: David Willming

Aurora Art Walk

I showed art and hung out in Aurora, Illinois last night at the Aurora Art Walk. My buddy Matt Schwarz accompanied me. We had a good time talking to art appreciators and then visited the Two Brothers round house then the Casino. Matt won a bit at roulette. I am broke so was very boring and just did some slots and came out even.

Elena in Horse Show

2010 article on filmmaker Chris Hefner

http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/edgewater-beach-hotel-the-pink-hotel-film-chris-hefner/Content?oid=1629191

Chris Hefner with the zeppelin model from The Pink Hotel

Last summer, sometime during the five weeks he spent stringing Swedish moss on a 950-square-foot expanse of chicken wire for Olafur Eliasson’s Moss Wall at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chris Hefner heard an NPR piece about the legendary last meal of French president Francois Mitterand: a tiny songbird called the ortolan that’s force-fed, drowned alive in Armagnac, plucked, seasoned, cooked, and then devoured—bones, innards, and all—by gourmets with napkins draped over their faces.

There are two traditional explanations for the napkin. One is that it captures the aroma of the dish. The other, as the narrator puts it at the beginning of Hefner’s debut feature film, The Pink Hotel, is that it hides “the glutton’s face from a fierce and terrible God.”

“The abject cruelty that illustrates is similar to the point I’m trying to make with the movie,” Hefner says, “about people living in an extremely decadent manner, who have to pay.”

Shot on black-and-white Super 8, with old-timey stylistic flourishes, The Pink Hotel—which premieres Friday, April 9, at the Music Box—is a sort of surreal fun-house reflection of early MGM talkies like Grand Hotel, the 1932 movie set at a posh Berlin pension. It’s wartime. Invited to a New Year’s Eve party that never materializes, the jet-setting denizens of the pink hotel munch ortolan and engage in other acts of gross consumption, chase ominous noises down winding corridors, and plot acts of sabotage as the hotel mysteriously disintegrates around them. A superimposed zeppelin model periodically rumbles across the skyline in a brazenly ragged effect.

Hefner takes every opportunity to highlight artifice in his work. Mainstream directors “spend so much energy making the medium invisible,” he says. “They don’t want to see things coming apart. It reminds them that they’re on a path that won’t last forever. . . . I work on the opposite end of the spectrum. Everything looks fake. You see the medium readily. The image jumps, it’s high-grain, the exposure is harsh. There’s this understanding that this is an object, like you and me. It’s got a life span. It won’t be around forever.”

The pink hotel in The Pink Hotel is inspired by the Edgewater Beach Apartments at 5555 N. Sheridan. Hefner, now 26, has been fascinated with this lakeside art deco icon since he came to Chicago to study film at Columbia College in 2002. It’s the last remnant of the once-sprawling Edgewater Beach Hotel complex, built in 1916 and for years a luxury destination, hosting the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Babe Ruth, Cary Grant, Judy Garland, Franklin Roosevelt, Frank Sinatra, and Marilyn Monroe. Its star began to wane when Lake Shore Drive was extended north past Foster in 1954, cutting the hotel off from its private beach, where big bands and circuses had performed. The hotel closed in 1967 and was demolished, leaving only the Apartments, which had gone co-op in 1949.

The Edgewater’s history sparked the idea for a film about transience and decay. “I started to draw connections between this hotel and the idea of an empire—a society that has this grandiose way of doing things, and those things start to fall apart,” Hefner says. “There’s this icon that the most important people involved themselves with for decades. How quickly it would disappear.”

The Edgewater Beach Apartments condo board turned down Hefner’s request to shoot in the building that inspired the movie, but he found a surrogate of similar vintage in Hyde Park’s Windermere House, filming its exterior as well as the hallways and elevator of the 12th floor, which was rumored to have been occupied by Muhammad Ali and his entourage in the early 1960s. Hefner also shot at the Reversible Eye, in the MCA warehouse basement, at the Music Box, and at the Willowbrook Ballroom on Archer in Willow Springs, said to be haunted by Chicago’s most famous ghost, Resurrection Mary. He biked to the sites, fitting all his production gear in a backpack and saddlebags.

Most of The Pink Hotel’s $10,000 budget came from Hefner’s own pocket, supplemented by fund-raisers like a shadow puppet show and a performance by Daniel Knox, whose Tin Pan Alley-style ballads are on the movie’s soundtrack. Hefner plays musical saw and melodica in Knox’s backup band.

He assembled his volunteer cast and crew from MCA coworkers and the loose-knit community of musicians, artists, and aerialists that revolves around the Reversible Eye Gallery in Humboldt Park. “We’d build the Eliasson stuff, then go over to the Reversible Eye and build the sets,” he says.

Hefner grew up outside Kalamazoo, where his parents were avid antiquarians. (They now sell antiques at a shop near South Haven.) He recalls having had “a lot of anxiety, a really rough time relating to my peers,” until, at age 12, he began attending the Southwest Michigan Visual Arts Academy, where he studied painting, photography, design, and performance after school. “I completely entered that world,” he says. “I wouldn’t be anywhere without that place.”

He started shooting photos when he was 13 or 14 years old, and the ornate frames he constructed for them from found materials grew into installations. When he began making short experimental films, he built nickelodeon-style housings in which to play them back, using old screens and amplifiers and, on one occasion, a stand made from deer hooves.

Though he speaks highly of his professors at Columbia, Hefner was frustrated by the prevailing commercial aesthetic among his classmates. “Eighty percent of the people in class wanted to makeThe Matrix or a Tarantino movie,” he says. “That stuff drives me crazy. I was excited about the films of Joseph Cornell and Guy Maddin,” which share a homemade, dreamlike quality. Hefner has cultivated a friendship with Maddin, 54, who’s based in Winnipeg, corresponding with him and exchanging work. “We go back and forth and dork out,” Hefner says.

“We’ve found we share a lot of excitements!” Maddin commented by e-mail. “I like corresponding with Chris because I always learn something new from him!”

After graduation in 2006, Hefner started working freelance for the MCA, setting up and breaking down exhibits. (He calls himself an “art carnie.”) Meanwhile he continued to produce a steady stream of shorts and installations, which he’s exhibited at Heaven Gallery, the Finch Gallery, and Swimming Pool Project Space. This summer he’ll work in Winnipeg as a camera operator and film diarist, shooting behind-the-scenes footage, for Maddin’s movie Key Hole. After that, Hefner plans to take The Pink Hotel on a European microcinema tour, with a different musician performing a 20-minute overture in each city. The tentative plan calls for Knox to play in London and the film’s composer, Tommy Jansen, in his hometown of Oslo.

Hefner turns his aesthetic of decay on romance in the film he’s writing now, The Poisoner, about a woman who answers a classified ad to marry and slowly kill a man. “Objects, animals, and people exist on this continuum of growth and erosion,” he muses. “It’s attractive to think of things connected that way. It’s upsetting, but it’s also calming.”   v

ReelAbilities Chicago Disabilities Film Festival

Celebrate the lives of people with disabilities at the ReelAbilities Chicago Disabilities Film Festival in Oak Park. Explore film, art and performance April 25-29 that will open your mind and heart. Programming on April 29th includes a panel discussion featuring David Krueger and Ryan Shuquem and a performance of the Arts of Life Band

Never before presented in Chicagoland, ReelAbilities Chicago Disabilities Film Festival features award-winning films, thoughtful panel discussions, art gallery works and live musical performances that bring together the community to celebrate the lives of people with disabilities.

http://chicago.reelabilities.org/