Bay Area Premieres!
Artists in Person

The suburb is a place of charmed suspension. But it's not an innocent place; rather, it cautions, in a disquieting whisper, that at any moment the stillness could be rent. Though wildly different in manner, Jordan Biren and Jennifer Reeder are uncanny chroniclers of this unspoken warning. Biren's newest advisory, My Mother's House (2006, 20 mins, DVCAM), tracks a home emptied of its reassuring order, but not the phantom memories. It's like a Thomas Kinkade painting with a chill factor. The earlier My Mother's Family (1997, 13:40 mins, DVCAM) is a whimsical fairy tale of stasis. Still images simulating a family album contain an impenetrable secret, revealed only by the text that follows. In Reeder's magical high-definition noir The Heart & Other Small Shapes (2006, 29:30 mins, High Definition Video), the characters are enveloped in a muffled atmosphere. Their embraces, studied and distant, are no different than the inanimate objects nearby. In fact, in this miraculous doldrum, the inanimate comes alive. Reeder's unnerving A Room with the Walls Blasted to Shreds and Falling (2001, 34 mins, Beta SP) gazes at a suburb smothered in mystery. Like a still life with motion, the tidy streets, mesmerizing traffic, and spruce interiors suggest that some epiphany will soon disrupt the subdivision.