Friday, April 7, 2023, 7 pm ET

Online + in-person @ Squeaky Wheel

Free or suggested donation. ASL interpretation provided.

Click here for tickets

Squeaky Wheel is pleased to present this virtual artist talk with our Spring 2023 Workspace Residents! Dena Kopolovich (Flushing, NY), Elenie Chung (Los Angeles, CA), Laura Jaramillo (Durham, NC), and Miranda Javid (Port Ewen, NY) will be presenting and speaking to their previous and current projects, and engage in a Q&A moderated by curator Ekrem Serdar.

During time with Squeaky Wheel, the residents will be working on a variety of projects including animations, hybrid works, lyrical essays on cinema, and non-fiction films. Dena Kopolovich will be working towards the completion of her upcoming short film Container Film, an experimental essay film created in a hybrid 16mm and digital format, that engages with Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”. Elenie Chung will be assembling All the Films in My Grandfather’s Closet a planned hybrid docu-fiction, telling the tale of Chung’s grandfather, a Chinese Trinidadian whose life had been defined by an early marriage, resistance to cultural customs and the changing times in Trinidad and Tobago from the 1930s to 2020s. Laura Jaramillo will be developing a book of lyrical essays investigating the fraught history of Colombian national cinema during the War on Drugs and global neoliberalization, interwoven with her own biography as a diasporic Colombian and her family’s history. Miranda Javid will continue animating, sound recording, and editing Human Behavior, a three-minute hand-drawn film drawn with sumi ink on tracing paper, which asks viewers how even small gestures can impact others.

In-person attendees can find information on how to get to Squeaky Wheel’s new location at Tri-Main Center here. The event will be available to register and view for 24 hours. SW members will have access to the event for 72 hours.

To find out more about the Workspace Residency, click here.

Biographies of the residents

Dena Kopolovich (b.1991) is a multimedia artist & filmmaker from New York. Her recent work uses past and present aesthetics to investigate the origin and continuity of meaning. She is interested in using cinematic forms to explore the derivation of instinctive human rituals & objects. In 2022 she completed a fellowship at LABA Laboratory for Jewish Culture, where she spent a year creatively interrogating ancient mythological texts. She is an Adjunct Professor in the Film & Media Department at Hunter College and a Teaching Artist at the cinema-arts non-profit Mono No Aware. Dena received her education from the Purchase College Conservatory of Theater Arts, with a concentration in Directing and the Integrated Media Arts MFA at Hunter College.

Elenie Chung is a filmmaker and artist, born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, currently based in Los Angeles, CA. She is interested in using female relationships as a method of illustrating cultural disconnection and ancestral amnesia. Her films have screened in international festivals and art exhibitions. Since attending the University of California, Los Angeles to achieve an MFA in Film Directing/Production, she has been working remotely at Women Make Movies, a non-profit feminist media arts organization based in New York City and has been contributing to film organizations in Los Angeles to amplify under-recognised films by women, international and non-white filmmakers.

Laura Jaramillo is a critic and poet working at the intersection of film and media theory, lyrical poetry, and essay. She received her PhD in critical theory from Duke University where she wrote her dissertation on avant-garde Latin American and Spanish cinema. She is the author of two books of poetry Material Girl (subpress, 2012) and Making Water (Futurepoem, 2022). Her writings on film and contemporary media have appeared in JumpCut, Feminist Media Histories, and IndyWeek. She is currently at work on a book of essays about the death and rebirth of Colombian cinema during the neoliberal era.

Miranda Javid is an animator, curator, and art-educator with a Masters in Fine Art from the University of California Irvine and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her animations describe topics like cognitive experience, human bias, and the relationship between individuals and their communities. These films have shown nationally and internationally at festivals like the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Eyeworks Film Festival, Slamdance, the Flaherty Seminar, and Malt Adult. She is a Kenan Fellow, a Denniston Hill resident, a Sherman Fairchild grantee, and a recipient of the Nancy Harrigan Prize, given through the Baker Artist Fund. Her drawings have been shown at Commune1 in Cape Town, S Africa, The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Mint Museum of Art in North Carolina, and Vox Populi in Philadelphia, PA. Currently, she lives in unceded Munsee territory also known as the Hudson Valley in New York State.

Workspace Residency is generously supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Image description: Four photographs against a graphic background. Left to right and top to bottom are: a portrait of Dena Kopolovich, gazing off to the left and smiling, wearing a light brown turtleneck, with curly long auburn hair that is styled down. The background is a brick wall painted two different shades of red; A close up of Elenie Chung, a young woman of East Asian descent wearing glasses and with short black hair. She is wearing a green and pink checkered wool scarf; Laura Jaramillo, a woman in a black dress stares off to the right of the frame. There are trees and foliage behind her; and Miranda Javid, a femme iranian woman in her mid-thirties stands in front of lush trees.