TRY THIS ONE AGAIN

A UC San Diego Visual Arts Department Video Presentation

Organized by Cuyler Ballenger, Maddie Butler, and Michelle Sui

Granular repetitions, aerial choreographies, and an interrupted still life take us from rehearsal to foreplay, and back again. One man asks another, "What's the funny part?" Amidst Gothic fever dreams, anarcho-revolutionaries, Oriental iconographies and various misfirings, we are given the opportunity to find the punchline, or try again. --Michelle Sui

________________

Title: Chimera (Edison)
Artist: Andrew Wharton
Run Time: 9:39 

Chimera (Edison) is an amalgamated creation story, achieved through a retelling of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. 

________________ 

Title: i’ve been waiting to smile for a long time
Artist: Christine Negus
Run Time: 4:27 

i’ve been waiting to smile for a long time moves between an approximate (and absurd) Greco Roman reconstruction and the filmmaker’s sister trying to remake a ceramic childhood homage project, all the while bringing it under the melancholy umbrella of Billy Corgan’s serenade. 

_______________ 

Title: Jeff Reads Jokes
Artist: Cuyler Ballenger
Run time: 4:04 

I make films with and about my family. Sometimes they are serious, sometimes they are a laugh. I’d like that they be both at all times. This film, Jeff Reads Jokes, is an ironic portrayal of an inside joke (that he is in fact a great joke teller, but put the camera on him, he freezes up) and an homage to the 1996 book, Ray’s a Laugh by Richard Billingham, who famously photographed his impoverished, drunken family and exposed them to the art world. In a 2016 interview for the Guardian Billingham was asked if Ray minded the photos (many of which portray Ray as a debauched lunatic) to which Billingham answered: “I don’t think he took any notice, or if he did it was probably that he was pleased I was in the room with him. The camera acted as a mediator.” I would characterize my relationship with my father, Jeff, in the same way. We have made at least ten projects together in some form. I don’t think he has looked at one of them. It’s not that he doesn’t care, it’s just not what interests him about working together. Whereas I, the artist, am simple minded: I look at the film and evaluate it. The joke is on me. 

_______________ 

Title: Dialogues Over the Sounds of Military Jets
Artist: Jae Hwan Lim
Run time: 7:05 

WARNING REPEATING JET SOUND: Please watch with caution. 

This video promotes an experimental collective conversation planned for Tuesday, June 10, 2025, in the UCSD VAF Performance Space. To RSVP for this conversational project, scan the QR code at the end of the video. 

_______________ 

Title: OVERTURE (2025)
Artist: erika roos
Run time: 3:43 

OVERTURE is a movement medi(t)ation with(in) the complex entanglements of bodily preservation and loss. marking erika's first time working with analog film -- itself a bodily material -- and held by sustained, kinesthetic research into interspecies relationships with death and decay, OVERTURE is an open(ing) inquiry into how organisms (photo)synthesize and (de)compose time. 

_______________ 

Title: Anarkata (2025)
Artist: Nykelle Devivo
Run time: 3:30 

In the wake of mass death, I propose we honor violence as living spiritual beings through the visual representations of Black rage and resistance. I follow in the legacy of a family of matriarchs who spoke to God through various forms of divination, using my practice to channel higher powers. I primarily speak to (or through) Anarkata, the embodiment of Black anarcho-revolutionaries, as well as the unnamed Masquerade who holds within all our ancestors martyred by the devil that is white supremacy. I wear their faces as stand-ins for what was lost through the inherent racism of the archive, reconstructing their likenesses through a process of critical fabulation. I understand our skin to be a sign of the apocalypse coming for western modernity and fertile ground for worlds we have yet even to be free enough to imagine. The spirits I speak to are here to help us transition into the end of a world never meant for us as an act of love from our ancestors 

_______________ 

Title: Behalf
Artist:. Michelle Sui
Run time: 4:33 

Role-playing, Oriental iconographies, and the dislocations of voice are revisited in director Michelle Sui's second film in their Chinatown trilogy. The runtime of 4'33" playfully nods at John Cage's famous composition, while an old song understood by some, and not others, plays.