Community Action Center / C.L.U.E., Part I

High Desert Test Sites presents a screening under the stars! Join us Saturday evening, June 9, 2012, for a special outdoor presentation of A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner’s feature-length video Community Action Center androbbinschilds and A.L. Steiner’s video and performance work C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience), Part I.

Community Action Center (2010, 69 min) incorporates the erotics of a community where the personal is not only political, but sexual. This project was heavily inspired by 1970’s porn-romance-liberation films that served as distinct portraits of the urban inhabitants, landscapes and the body politic of a particular time and place. Community Action Center is a unique contemporary womyn-centric composition that serves as both an ode and a hole-filler. Sex, sexuality, and the complexities of gendered bodies are inherently political. This project is a small archive of an intergenerational community built on collaboration, friendship, sex, and art. The work attempts to explore a consideration of feminist fashion, sexual aesthetics, and an expansive view of what is defined as ‘sex’.

Burns and Steiner worked with artists and performers who created infinitely complex gender and performance roles that are both real and fantastical, set to a soundtrack of music culled from the worldwide sisterhood: Chicks on Speed, Effi Briest, Electrelane, K8 Hardy, Lesbians on Ecstasy, Light Asylum, MEN, Motherland, NGUZUNGUZU, I.U.D. (Lizzi Bougatsos & Sadie Laska), Kinski, and Thee Majesty (Genesis P-Orridge), and featuring original compositions by Justin Bond, Nick Hallett & Sam Greenleaf Miller, Ashland Mines & Wu Tsang, Sergei Tcherepnin, and Tri-State Area with AV Linton.

The video seeks to expose and reformulate paradigms that are typical of porn typologies, intentionally exploiting tropes for their comical value, critical consideration and historical homage. The artists have created a reason to reflect on the cultural realness of homo-grown lesbian sexuality, and the work aims to be a hedonistic and distinctly political adventure.

C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience), Part I (2007, 10:48 min) is a collaborative video and performance work by New York-based artists robbinschilds (Layla Childs and Sonya Robbins) and A.L. Steiner, with AJ Blandford and Seattle-based band Kinski.

C.L.U.E., Part I utilizes choreographed language as a vehicle to explore the natural and human-made landscape. The journey embodies a poignant freedom expressed in the union of humanity with the vast natural world, juxtaposed against the contemporary tendency toward consumerism, waste, and disposable architecture. Filmed through cities, deserts, hills, forests, and along the coast of Southern California and upstate New York, the natural variety of landscapes provide a rich array of environments spanning from salt flats and high desert to redwood forests and rocky beaches, through dry river basins and vast parking lots, to suburban swimming pools and green lawns, 60’s-era modern civic architecture to abandoned industrial relics, to big box stores and malls in our consumer-driven culture.

Saturday, June 9, 2012, 8 - 10 pm
A-Z West
Joshua Tree, CA