Sometimes Cinema

Role
Founder, Curator, Live Event Producer

Date
2024-current

Duration: 
Two 120 minute long programs, 14 days apart

Technical Details: 
Electricity, Bathroom, Projector, computer, Two PA speakers, 
7 book shelves, books, 
two string lights, popcorn machine, cooler, five gallon water jug,
visual art, sound art, mix sets from local DJs, 
old friends, new friends, strangers.



PROGRAM 01:
Imbalancing Acts For The Times Ahead
microcinema ≈ bookshop ≈ art event
@sometimescinema

hosted by @Chica_club

saturday may 18th 2024
bookshop ≈ coffee 1-7pm
doors 730pm
show 8pm

tickets $5-10 sliding scale
includes complimentary popcorn
no one turned away for lack of funds

≈ moving image works ≈

Sam Frésquez @samfresquez
Ayanna Dozier @dozierayanna
Tulapop Saenjaroen @tulapopsaenjaroen

≈ bookstore curation ≈

ENVY Magazine @envy.mag
Maggie Pierce @___________________horrorvacui
Francisco Cantú
Germán Benincore @gbenincore
Eternal Now @eternalnow.space

≈ music selections ≈

Memo Gutierrez @omem
Karima Walker @karimawalker
Mikey Foster Estes @mikeyfosterestes

≈ found footage projects ≈

Erin Cortinas

≈ curated by ≈

Bradley Smith @bradleybradley___








PROGRAM 01
NOTES

The Meet Cute
Sam Frésquez
2022, 10 min

In the dreamworld of popular narrative cinema, do you imagine yourself into a film as the hero? Using found footage of American rom-coms from the 1980’s onward, the artist performs the roles of each male protagonist and mimics their gestures and dialogue, while using lighting and camera angles to match the source material. The Meet Cute series redeploys the absurdity, tenderness, and relationships that populate the genre while playfully queering the first moments of each on-screen crush. (Courtesy of Lisa Sette Gallery.)






Close, but No Cigar: A trilogy by Ayanna Dozier

A Picture For Parco
Ayanna Dozier
2022, 3 min

A Picture for Parco, recreates a 1980s commercial made for the Japanese department store chain by Kazumi Kurigami taking on the role previously played by an elegantly dressed Faye Dunaway sitting at a table, set against a black background, slowly and seductively eating a hardboiled egg. Filmed on the one-year anniversary of my last colposcopy, the piece evokes a range of intense feelings not present in the original.















lovertits
Ayanna Dozier
2022, 4 min

Assuming the character of a young woman who enters a love motel to re-train her emotions about love and sex, lovertits is inspired in part by Charles Matton’s French erotica movie Spermula. In this version, the woman, who is seen bathing in a bikini in a heart-shaped bath, unsuccessfully attempts to embrace “superficial happiness, femininity and passiveness.”




an exercise in parting
Ayanna Dozier
2022, 3 min

An examination of a go-go dancer walking home from work late at night, attempting to resurrect her lost childhood on kiddie rides in front of a small store. Close-up images of the artist’s face collapse into abstraction as the pony ride breaks down.














A Room With A Coconut View
Tulapop Saenjaroen
2018, 29 min

“A Room with a Coconut View” tells a story of Kanya, a tour guide and hotel rep automated voice, who leads her foreign automated-voice guest Alex through a deceptively aestheticised beach town in the east of Thailand. Dissatisfied by the sanitized, touristic images, Alex decides to explore alone. Local corruption becomes intertwined with the history of Thai cinema, and Alex begins to question how images have been used to mediate his understanding of the world.

Through a fictionalized account of the bodiless voices hovering over commercially made presentation and historical strata, “A Room with a Coconut View” is an essayistic investigation of the politico-aesthetic relation through imagery surface and its netlike-technology apparatuses with a capitalistic-dictatorial-touristy regime as a backdrop.





≈ curated by ≈
Bradley Smith @bradleybradley___

<3

@sometimescinema 
hosted by @Chica_club
Quality Art Always
6875 N. 21st Ave Phoenix AZ



















 

PROGRAM 02

ONE THOUSAND AND ONE ATTEMPTS TO BE AN OCEAN

@sometimescinema
microcinema ≈ bookshop ≈ art event

hosted by @chica_club

<3 tonite <3

Wednesday May 29th 2024
Bookshop 4pm ≈ Doors 730pm ≈ Showtime 8pm

Tickets $5-10 sliding scale
includes complimentary popcorn
No one turned away for lack of funds



PROGRAM 02
NOTES

Borrowing our title from Wang Yuyan’s hypnotic found footage piece from 2021, ONE THOUSAND AND ONE ATTEMPTS TO BE AN OCEAN comprises short works from artists exploring our desire to enter strong currents. So that we might lose ourselves to gain ourselves, whole again.

Two more films added by Ayanna Dozier that will be screening with us for the first time



≈ Moving Image works ≈
Justine Lavilla @saintsissy
2022, 5m

The river dreams a simple dream, drifting as the sun passes overhead to stop and kiss two mystical beings as they steal away the afternoon. Fantasies are made real in the prayer of your presence.


Forever Your Girl
Ayanna Dozier @dozierayanna
2022, 8 m

Black girlhood is often an accelerated path to becoming an adult where innocence and bodily agency are denied and any attempts to return are simultaneously deemed inappropriate and unobtainable. While inspired by soft-porn aesthetics, this work defies the anticipated imagery and familiar mood of pornographic content. 


Nightwalker
Ayanna Dozier @dozierayanna
2022, 6m

"Nightwalker" codes disproportionately target Black femmes or women who “make a display” by wearing clothing that can be deemed risqué by an arresting officer. An extension of a Polaroid and audio project entitled Solicitation of Crimes Against Nature (2021), this film draws attention to how the surveillance eye overlaps with the gaze of a potential predator. 


One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean
Wang Yuyan @yuyanwang
2021, 12m

One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean reflects on the experience of not being able to see the world with depth perception. Composed of micro-events from "satisfying video" that swarm on the internet, an abstract narrative unfolds by referring to trance and minimal music. It's an exploration of a world that can all too often fall into the superficial that recognises its pleasures as well as its pitfalls.


Synchronized Driving No. 1
Sam Frésquez @samfresquez
2022, 4m

Inspired by Old Hollywood’s Golden Era of Busby Berkeley swimming pool sequences as seen from above, a squadron of precision drivers are playfully choreographed by the artist to share their exquisite abilities of grace and coordination instead of speed and competition.


Me loving you/You loving me
Mikey Foster Estes @mikeyfosterestes
2022, 9m

Me loving you/You loving me is an experimental film that depicts a tattoo made in tribute to my mother. In the film, her signature from a greeting card, “MOM XOXO,” is inscribed on my butt, a playful reference to an inside joke we shared. Soundscape includes field recordings, voicemail clips, spoken text, and manipulated audio from “Mama” by the Spice Girls, a song with the lyric from which the film takes its name.


Squish!
Tulapop Saenjaroen @tulapop_s
2021, 18m

Squish! is a meditation on the self through lurid and liquid forms; filtered through both old and foreseeable technology informed by Thai animation history and contemporary culture, and a constant process of constructing and deforming new selves to simulate ‘movements’. 



≈ Sound assemblage ≈

Ascension
Memo Gutierrez @omem_
2024, 16m


≈ Bookshop curation ≈

@envy.mag
@___________________horrorvacui
Francisco Cantú
@gbenincore


≈ Music selections ≈

@omem_
@karimawalker
@mikeyfosterestes



≈ Curated by ≈

@bradleybradley___



<3
@sometimescinema 
hosted by @chica_club
Quality Art Always
6875 N. 21st Ave Phoenix AZ


P.S. ≈ this will be our last screening at 21st Ave and Glendale. A big thank you to @chica_club for generously hosting our beginnings. Please stop by to convene and conversate for our final event at this location before we move along to our next spot.






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