EventsThe New Social Environment#190

To Jonas with Love: A Conversation with Chuck Smith, Benn Northover, and Friends

With an introduction from Phong H. Bui

Tuesday, December 8, 2020 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

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David Belisle, Mike Figgis, Raha Raissnia, Lee Ranaldo, and Leah Singer will join Chuck Smith and Benn Northover to discuss “To Jonas with Love,” a multimedia exhibition honoring Jonas Mekas.

In this Talk

To Jonas with Love (Ki Smith Gallery) is a multimedia exhibition honoring Jonas Mekas curated by Chuck Smith and Benn Northover. For over sixty years, from his earliest days living on Orchard Street in the 1950s until his passing in 2019, Lithuanian filmmaker, poet, and artist Jonas Mekas was a cultural icon of Downtown NYC and a passionate guardian of artistic freedom. As he wandered through- out the city with his ever-present camera, Jonas always sought glimpses of beauty and poetry amid the bustle of the streets.

Through his work and activism he stood as a guiding light for generations of artists and filmmakers. Along the way, he founded Film Culture magazine, the Filmmakers Co-op and Cinematheque, Anthology Film Archives, and the now-legendary Movie Journal col- umn in The Village Voice. This month, Jonas’s friends come together to celebrate the joy and inspiration that Jonas evoked and to remember his vibrant and undying poetic spirit. This exhibition features an eclectic mix of artists and filmmakers whose works either em- body or directly respond to Jonas’s tireless creativity and self-expression. To Jonas with Love will include a traditional gallery installation of photography, painting, drawing, and sculpture at the new Ki Smith Gallery East Village (197 East 4th Street) as well as a film and video installation with projections and monitors at the Gallery’s annex (181 Mott Street). (Read the full press release.)

David Belisle

David Belisle is a self-taught analog photographer who got his start capturing the beginnings of the Grunge Movement in Seattle. Since then, he’s gone on to photograph The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Mudhoney, Fleet Foxes and REM (whom he toured with for several years), to name a few. Since 2011, David has lived and worked in New York City as Michael Stipe’s studio manager.

Raha Raissnia

A photo of Raha Raissnia on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Raha Raissnia learned to paint from filmmakers and musicians rather than painters. Years spent at Anthology Film Archives left her well-versed in the cinematic avant-garde, and her projection performances often involve collaborations with experimental musicians Aki Onda and Charles Curtis. Above all, Raissnia’s work aspires to the temporal and experiential condition of music—suggestive, ambiguous, abstract. Over the past decade, the artist’s paintings, drawings, and films have unfolded within a permutational, self- reflexive structure. In her earlier work, the artist presented dense, architectonic black and white drawings and paintings that appeared to echo a certain postwar European abstraction.

    Lee Ranaldo

    A photo of Lee Ranaldo on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
    Photo by Alex Rademakers
    Musician, visual artist, and writer Lee Ranaldo co-founded Sonic Youth in 1981, and has been active on the New York and International music and art scenes for the past 40+ years as composer, performer and producer. He also exhibits visual art and has published several books of journals, poetry and writings on music. His LP Names of North End Women was released in February 2020 on Mute Records.

    Leah Singer

    Leah Singer is a multi-disciplinary artist working in film, video, photography, printmaking and small book publishing. As a journalist she centers her work on artist interviews most recently with the architect James Wines and the photographer Mitch Epstein. Since the early 90s she has collaborated with musician Lee Ranaldo on live film and music performances.

    Chuck Smith

    A photo of Chuck Smith on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
    Filmmaker, TV producer, and writer Chuck Smith has produced documentaries and TV series for National Geographic, Discovery, CBS News, and many others. His films include Barbara Rubin: the Exploding NY Underground (2019) and Forrest Bess: Key to the Riddle (1999). The Bess film was turned into a book and published in 2013 by PowerHouse Books. Mr. Smith’s other independent films and interviews can be found on his YouTube Channel ChuckSmithNYC and on Vimeo.

    Benn Northover

    Benn Northover is an Actor and Director. He was a close friend and collaborator with Jonas Mekas for over two decades, leading to several film and video projects and a number of international gallery exhibitions at institutions including the Centre Pompidou, BFI London and Agnès b.’s Galerie du Jour in Paris. In 2012 Northover co-curated the landmark exhibition of work by Mekas at the Serpentine Gallery in London alongside Hans-Ulrich Obrist.

      We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨

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