Live Music and Film
Cinema on the Verge
With Brent Green, Vanessa Renwick, Walt McClements, and Marisa Anderson
Image from Bear Cave - Vanessa Renwick
In Partnership with Aurora Picture Show
The Houston Cinema Arts Festival is bringing back two experimental film artists who presented memorable shows during HCAF’s first decade. Self-taught visual and filmmaker Brent Green will serve as narrator and musician and multi-instrumentalist Walt McClements (Dark Dark Dark, Lonesome Leash, Hooray for the Riff Raff) will accompany. The program features Green’s distinctive animation works, including A Brief Spark Bookended by Darkness, Carlin, and Strange Fates. The emotionally charged films enchant audiences through lyrical narrations and somber underlying themes with flickering stop-motion Southern Gothic flair.
Special Guests
Vanessa Renwick
Founder and janitor of the Oregon Department of Kick Ass (odoka.org), Vanessa Renwick is an artist by nature. Working in experimental and poetic documentary forms, her iconoclastic work embodies her interest in landscape and transformation, and relationships between bodies and landscapes, and all sorts of borders. She has been a singular voice in experimental cinema for over 20 years. Eschewing an allegiance to any one medium or form, Renwick builds authentic moving image works revealing an insatiable curiosity and unflinching engagement with the world around her; including, but not limited to, radical politics and environmental issues.
She has screened work in hundreds of venues internationally, including The Museum of Modern Art, Light Industry, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Art Basel, Oberhausen, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Centre Pompidou, Bread and Puppet Theater and True/False Film Festival, among many others.
Brent Green
A self-taught visual artist and filmmaker, Brent Green’s films have screened, often with live musical accompaniment, at such venues as Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Hammer Museum, Sundance Film Festival, as well as rooftops, warehouses and galleries throughout the world. Often, his sculptural work and large-scale installations are displayed alongside his animated films. Green has had solo exhibitions at the Arizona State University Art Museum, SITE Santa Fe, the Kohler Arts Center, and the Berkeley Art Museum. His work is in several public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Hammer Museum, and the American Folk Art Museum.
Walt McClements
Walt McClements, an accordionist and multi-instrumentalist, was known for his work in Dark Dark Dark and Hurray for the Riff Raff before beginning his solo project Lonesome Leash. Using a sparse palette of accordion, drums and voice McClements crafts stark yet complex songs, nervous and triumphant hymns to the restless. McClements released his debut LP I Am No Captain (2013) and playing over 200 shows between the USA, Mexico and Europe, followed by the release of EP One Foot In Front of the Other (2013), and other alternative indie album releases including Precious Futures (2015).
Marisa Anderson
Marisa Anderson channels the history of the guitar and stretches the boundaries of tradition. Her deeply original work applies elements of minimalism, electronic music, drone and 20th century classical music to compositions based on blues, jazz and gospel and country music, re-imagining the landscape of American music. In 2011, she released her first solo guitar record, The Golden Hour, followed by Mercury (2013) and Into the Light (2016), which was named one of the best records of 2016 by Billboard magazine. She is in demand as a touring artist throughout Europe and North America, as well as collaborator and composer with other artists.