Art & … Cult Pleasures
Image: Messiah of Evil. Directed by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. V/M Productions, 1973.
Conversation and screening with James N. Kienitz Wilkins & David Levine
June 30, 2016 at 7pm
Filmmaker and current artist-in-residence James N. Kienitz Wilkins invites artist David Levine to discuss and screen the 1973 cult film Messiah of Evil at Triangle. Levine’s selection comes out of an ongoing conversation between the two artists about the pleasures of genre films, and the difficulty more critical discourses have in addressing, mastering, or submitting to them.
The screening is about Levine and Kienitz-Wilkins’ desire to share a film that’s both bad and good, in ways that are often more compelling and thought-provoking than films that are just consistently and classically “good.“ Kienitz Wilkins will lead an introductory conversation with Levine. This will bleed into the screening of Messiah of Evil, complete with free popcorn and beer.
James N. Kienitz Wilkins (b. 1983) is a filmmaker and artist living in Brooklyn. His projects explore language and performance, and often blend original scriptwriting with documentary sources. His short films, features and multimedia projects have been presented at international film festivals and venues including the New York Film Festival, Rotterdam IFF, CPH:DOX, MoMA PS1, Edinburgh IFF, Migrating Forms, and beyond. Recent awards include the Founder’s Spirit Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival 2015, a Grand Prix at 25 FPS Festival 2015, and the LICHTER Art Award from the LICHTER Filmfest Frankfurt International 2016. Wilkins is a graduate of the Cooper Union School of Art and is in residence at Triangle from June–August 2016.
David Levine is an artist working with performance, video, photography, and text. His projects, which explore the relationship of privacy, performance, and language, range from Private Moment (Creative Time, 2016), which infiltrated live, looped performances of film scenes back into New York’s Central Park, to the essay International Art English (written with Alix Rule for Triple Canopy, 2012), which examined the interdependence of art writing, the press release, and the internet.