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Separation of the Earth (By Fire)

Angelo Madsen

2015 00:05:40 United StatesEnglishColorStereo16:9HD video

Description

Separation of the (Earth by Fire) is a multi-disciplinary project that includes print collages, audio, and video. Together these works rethink the politicization of the image of the child, using David Wojnarowiczʼs “One Day This Kid Will Get Larger,” as a conceptual springboard. From pre-existing mainstream films, the video uses imagery of violent encounters between children and adults. The most repetitive of which is sourced from the film A Home of Our Own, which aired frequently on the Family Channel throughout the 1990s. As the violence unfolds, images meld together. A child’s screaming mouth transforms into a fleshy void. Assemblage and deconstruction, erasure and visibility breakdown. The audio is a three-part choral arrangement composed by Angelo Madsen Minax and performed by his friends. The lyrics were developed using a text-collage practice to remove the call to action sensibility from “One Day This Kid Will Get Larger,” leaving only Wojnarowiczʼs most poetic scraps of language. From these scraps a new text is born.

 

About Angelo Madsen

Angelo Madsen (previously known as Madsen Minax or Angelo Madsen Minax 2005-2024) is a multi-disciplinary artist, filmmaker, and educator. His projects consider how human relationships are woven through personal and collective histories, cultures, and kinships, with specific attention to subcultural experience, phenomenology, and the politics of desire.

Madsen's works have shown at Berlinale, Sundance Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, BAM CinemaFest, Art of the Real at Lincoln Center, Anthology Film Archives, British Film Institute, and dozens of LGBT and experimental film festivals around the world. He is a recipient of awards and fellowships from the Sundance Film Institute, BAVC Media, New York State Council on the Arts, the Warhol Foundation, LEF Foundation, and has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Yaddo, MacDowell, Pioneer Works, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and others. His film, North By Current (2021), aired on season 34 of POV (PBS), was nominated for an Independent Spirit award, and won the Cinema Eye Honors Spotlight award, Best Writing award from the IDA and numerous festival jury prizes. A New York Times Critics Pick, North By Current has been called "A beautiful, complex wonder of a film," by Rolling Stone and "A titanic work" by Criterion. Madsen is currently an Associate Professor of Time-Based Media at the University of Vermont, a current USA Artists Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow.