May 21^st – May 27^th
With work by Martha Colburn & David Gracon
As part of Squeaky@x0

The penultimate week in Squeaky Wheel’s 30^th Anniversary exhibition brings together only two works:  Martha Colburn’s 1997 cut-up animation I Can’t Keep Up and David Gracon’s Strip Mall Nature. Colburn’s work interposes her at this well-known animation style – grotesque, visceral, radical – with a poem by 99 Hooker on the claustrophobic nature of consumerist culture. On the other end of the room, under headphones, Gracon’s video finds a small moment of peace within the unlikely location of a strip mall, geese walking amongst “dead spaces” meant for cars and trucks and cement. The two pieces come together to form a contrast, and point towards ways for us to escape a 24/7 life of consumption. – ES

I Can’t Keep Up
Martha Colburn
3 min, 16mm to DV, USA, 1997
I Can’t Keep Up is an animated collage film meditating on the pace and the commercialization of modern life with poetry by 99 Hooker being read over frenetically edited magazine images and sampled footage.

Strip Mall Nature (Ordinary Video Series #5)
David Gracon
6:41 min, HDV, USA, 2013
This observational documentary video seeks to find beauty and poetry in the most unlikely of places — a commercial strip mall where a flock of Canadian geese have appropriated this consumer environment as their own.