Oregon Stills Exhibition – Aaron Katz, Matt McCormick & Kelly Reichardt

OREGON STILLS

On View September 1st – September 30th, 2011

Opening reception Tuesday September 6th, 6pm – 8pm

STUMPTOWN COFFEE ROASTERS
128 SW 3RD Avenue | Portland, OR

Carefully selected by filmmakers Aaron Katz, Matt McCormick, and Kelly Reichardt and curators May Barruel and Justen Harn, this exhibition features stills from three films shot in Oregon: Cold Weather, Some Days Are Better Than Others,and Meek’s Cutoff. Crew photographers include Scott Green, Neil Kopp, and Greg Schmitt. Shawn Levy, a film critic for The Oregonian, will be providing a curatorial statement that will be sent out to press at the end of August. The show is supported by Oregon Film and Newspace Center for Photography and benefits the nonprofit Hollywood Theatre.

A bit more about the filmmakers…

Aaron Katz was born in rainy Portland, OR. He became interested in film and acting while still in high school. After realizing he wasn’t that good of an actor, he decided to go to film school at North Carolina School of the Arts. Immediately after graduating, he and two of his college roommates drove a 1963 Chevy Nova from North Carolina toPortland, OR in order to make Dance Party, USA, his first feature. Quiet City, his second feature, premiered at SXSW in 2007. Subsequently, Quiet City had critically praised theatrical runs in several cites, was nominated for the John Cassavetes Award at Film Independent’s Spirit Awards, and was featured on several year end top ten lists. Katz’ third feature, Cold Weather, was released in 2010 by IFC films and opened to similar critical acclaim. Katz currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Matt McCormick is a filmmaker and artist who lives in Portland, Oregon and is a wearer of many hats. His work crosses mediums and defies genre distinctions to fashion witty, abstract observations of contemporary culture and the urban landscape. He is a relentless do-it-yourselfer and an important fixture within the experimental film community. McCormick has worked and collaborated with many artists and musicians including Broken Bells, The Shins, Miranda July, Sleater-Kinney, The Postal Service, YACHT, Al Burian, Eluvium, Patton Oswalt, and Calvin Johnson. He has beena pioneer in the field of distribution and exhibition: extensively touring his work, creating the video label Peripheral Produce, and founding the PDX Film Festival. Three of his films have been shown at the Sundance Film Festival, and his work has been screened or exhibited at MoMA, The Serpentine Gallery, The Oslo Museum of Modern Art, theReykjavik Art Museum, The Seattle Art Museum, the Moscow Biennial, and Art Basil. Awards he’s received include Best Short Film from the San Francisco International Film Fest, Best Experimental from the New York Underground FilmFest, and Best Narrative from the Ann Arbor Film Fest. His film The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal was named in‘Top 10 / Best of 2002’ lists in both The Village Voice and Art Forum magazine. McCormick has an album of music andsoundtrack work titled Very Stereo that was released by Marriage Records. His visual art is represented by the ElizabethLeach Gallery in Portland, OR.

Kelly Reichardt is an American director, co-writer, editor, and currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Film andElectronic Arts at Bard College. American landscapes and narratives of the road are themes that runthroughout Reichardt’s work. Meek’s Cutoff, shot on the dry plains of Oregon’s high desert and featured in this exhibition, offers a vision of the earliest days of American frontier culture. Wendy and Lucy, filmed along the railroadtracks that surround an Oregon suburb, reveals the limits and depths of people’s duty to each other in tough times. Old Joy is an exploration of contemporary liberal masculinity, set in the tamed wilderness of the Pacific Northwest. Reichardt’s first feature, River of Grass, was shot in her hometown of Dade County, Florida. Sun-drenched highways, bus stations ,and dilapidated motels were the denatured setting for this lovers-on-the-run story.

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