On SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 20th, at 7pm, you're invited to the Film-Makers' Cooperative (475 Park Avenue South, 6th Floor) for a 20-year retrospective of the work of Erica Schreiner.

“Erica Schreiner’s videos span a 20-year period, charting her personal and creative evolution within that time frame, while also appearing to collapse time altogether. Her journey as a visual artist, performer and world-maker — beginning in her early 20s through to her early 40s — is crystallized here within the same gauzy, waxy, pastel-tinted medium. Schreiner’s work looks and feels like no one else’s; you always know when you are watching an Erica Schreiner video, and in this sense she is the definition of a true auteur. There are influences and compeers, certainly. As the artist (typically in an enclosed and claustrophobic space) turns the camera on herself, adorns herself with wigs and dresses and glitter, devours fruit and chocolate and butterflies, and smothers her body in paint, one can’t help but think of Věra Chytilová’s candy-coated feminist classic Daisies, Jacques Rivette’s lush and otherworldly Celine and Julie Go Boating (both of which Schreiner cites as key influences) or Chantal Akerman’s gleefully anarchic debut Saute ma ville. Like Schreiner’s work, all of these films probe the tension between creation and destruction and reveal the power and agency to be found in girlishness, whimsy, and so-called frivolity. There are also shades of Marja Samsom’s Super 8mm shorts from the 1970s, in which the artist — in a series of static, single-shot portraits — turns the camera on herself and engages subversively with apparatuses of traditional femininity and domesticity as her alter ego, ‘Miss Behave,’ thereby blurring the line between diaristic filmic portraiture and outright performance. Schreiner’s videos engage with all of these techniques, elements, and dichotomies through an intimate and hyper-feminine visual aesthetic, engendering connections to these antecedents while simultaneously transcending precedent altogether to emerge as totally original (and indelible) audiovisual evocations. Ultimately, Schreiner’s work invites viewers into a world that is all her own: one that reveals the softness in anarchy, the tenderness in ruination, and the capacity for creation amid devastation.” —Matt McKinzie (Co-curator)