A slate of experimental shorts from Canada for free tonight? Just press <ESC>.

Tonight curator J.J. Kegan McFadden brings ESCAPE, a free program of experimental shorts from Video Pool Media Arts Centre in Winnipeg, Canada to Portland’s Gallery HOMELAND (in Ford Building, corner of SE 10th and Division) at 8 PM. The program includes work by Lori Weidenhammer + Donna Lewis, Sylvia Matas, Ho Tam, Hope Peterson, Tim Raffey, Leslie Supnet, Dominique Rey, Lisa Graves + Deborah Van Slet, Victoria Prince, Doug Melnyk, Anne Borden + Gail Mentlik, Jeremy Drummond, Divya Mehra, Collin Zipp, and Ken Gregory.

Curator’s statement:

There has always been more than one way to escape. The term itself carries with it several connotations: to flee, to transcend, to avoid. In our ever-evolving digital realm, to escape means something different altogether. When online, we escape through various quasi-anonymous discourses (blogs, games, chat rooms). The button located at the top left of the computer keyboard provides the user a means to get out of certain messy situations; to begin anew. Here, I am interested in an escape narrative, one informed by the medium, by the history of story telling, and the Hero’s Journey. This escape attempt is for us all.

Various metaphors for escape are alluded to in the fifteen videos collected here: disguise, travel, dance, sex, and meditation each become important elements on this ESCAPE route. Thus, the sequential ordering of the videos in ESCAPE is important. I have attempted not only to collect these titles within a specific trope, but also to shape them in order to tell a story. The plot, one might recognize, when discussing such a topic, is informed by archetypal stories.

via Linda Austin’s PWNW blog:

Lori Felker and Ben Popp present “Via Chicago: An evening of films” June 17th at 9 PM at Performanceworks Northwest (4625 SE 67th) FREE or by donation.

“Lori Felker and Ben Popp both came from opposite sides of the country to obtain their masters degrees in film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Lori remained to teach at the school while Ben moved back out west to Portland, OR to try his hand at the film scene there screening works in Filmed By Bike and the Portland Underground Film Fest. Lori contacted Ben about doing a show as she comes through town on a trip out west. They both came to Portland…”via Chicago”

Pippa Possible and Crispin Rosenkranz moved from Portland to Chicago in 2007. Pippa began attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she will receive her BFA in December 2009. Pippa is the Station Manager at FreeRadioSAIC, and focuses on the time-arts – video, audio and performance. Crispin recieved his BS in Speech Communications at Portland State University. Before transplanting to Chicago, he has been a dancer, performer and video artist in Portland for over twenty years. Crispin will begin his Graduate Studies at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago beginning in Fall 2009, in Film/Video/New Media.”

Portland-based filmmaker Karl Lind is the best kind of maker, the kind we are so lucky to have many of in Portland, who in addition to doing his own projects, makes interesting work in collaboration with non-filmmakers, AND makes time to see that local filmmakers’ work gets seen. Since 2006, he’s been programming the Odds and Ends Screening series and is Gallery Homeland‘s “head of film and video reprogramming.” His beautiful short films like the 2004 “Eulogy for Memory” , (often, like Eulogy, incorporating found Super 8 footage) engage sound (music) and image equally, making implied narrative that is abstract enough to foreground images compelling in and of themselves. His work has screened at venues such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Experimenta, Les Contres Images and The Other Cinema. Currently working on, among other things, a karaoke music video for Devo’s Gates of Steel for the PDX Film Festival, Lind took a moment to answer the questions of the ultra Q wherein we ask Portland’s movers and makers a number of pressing questions.

Qualities you most admire in design and film: Directness, tangibility, relevance and perhaps a hint of emotion.

Qualities you most despise in design and film: needless obscurity and or pretentiousness

Reading: recently finished The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes

Listening to: Devo, Lhasa De Sala, Aesop Rock, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Flaming Lips, and Talkdemonic.

Dream project: Working on a project related to investigating and better understanding dreams.

Favorite virtue: Helping others, listening.

Favorite vice: Talking a lot, substances.

Tragic flaw: Over indulgence.

Secret superhero power: An overly active and unstoppable imagination.

That which keeps your afterburners firing: Hope.

What you’d like to be when you grow up: Stable.

Portland’s best kept secret: Well, snitches get stitches. I can’t comment on this one.

Portland heroes (sung or un-): Linda Austin, Gretchen Hogue, Vanessa Renwick, The Mickey Mouse hat trumpet man, Marc Moscato, Ron Gassaway, Holly Andres, Dan Pred, Grace Carter, Nate Goodman, Dan Ackerman, this list could go on for quite awhile longer…

Interesting on the horizon (PDX): How many more condos can a city of this size possibly take?

Lovely Petaluma is small A projects’ (1430 SE Third) screening series at the gallery. Tonight at 7 PM, installment no. 2 of the series finds Portland-based artist (and critical favorite) Storm Tharp presenting a program of excerpts from Boom, Suddenly Last Summer, and A Place in the Sun and discusses “what a crazed and unsubtle actress she (Elizabeth Taylor) is – and how great she is in her badness.”

It’s not the first time Tharp has considered Liz. What we didn’t know that is noted in his mini-bio on the press release is that, “To get into college he submitted drawings of Guess models on velvet paper and scratch-boards of movie stars. It worked.” There’s nothing that could warm up a frigid night like Liz Taylor in a green dress. Plus, beer and popcorn…and Tharp.

Odds and Ends, the screening series Portland filmmaker Karl Lind curates, is back with Vol. 3 “The Sight and Sound of Music Videos.” It’s a night of independently produced music videos by Portland and international film/video makers for artists like Lederhosen Lucil, Ohmega Watts, Mattress, Arthur and Yu, A Weather, Jean Grae, Plastic Little, Dan Deacon, Future Islands, Jakarta, Scream Club, Unrecognizable Now, and Montague.

You’ll see work by Allen Cordell, Nate Goodman, Whitey McConnaughey, Kara Blake, Chioke Nassor, Ted Passon, Autumn Andel, Matt McCormick, Uli Beutter, Cat Tyc and Adam Long, Grace Carter, Melanie Brown, Tyrone Olsen, Mike Mudd, Ron Gassaway, Gretchen Hogue, John Bacone, Chris Bennett, Rob Tyler, Ali Cotterill, and Vanessa Renwick.

Tonight, Saturday, January 12 at 8 PM (doors at 7) at Gallery Homeland (2505 SE 11th) in the Ford Building Portland. $7