Untitled (Just Kidding)

A program of recent experimental videos with performative interventions. The works play in creative reading, studied density, the one-(hundred)-liner, choirs, screen texts, the bootleg, the cover, jokes, speculative etymologies, accents, loops, the cinemagic, body swaps, poetry, citation and human voice. Conceptually engaged, language-intensive and visually mesmerizing, the suite scrambles somewhere in the intersects of conceptual comedy, dizzying illogics, the poetic plu-future and sustainable sourcing. Through deliberate mistranslation and strategic denaturing of languages and codes, Malmed revels in revealing their extra-communicative potential as sound, as image, as object, and shifting audiences’ concepts of the show, of the cinema.

Jesse Malmed is an artist and curator working in video, performance, text, occasional objects and their gaps and overlaps. Various pre-occupations include: Choir Conductor, Loveable Slouch, Paranoiac Research Assistant, Comic Concierge, Junk Shop Salesman, Re-Titler, Poet-Comedian, Traffic Caller, Bootlegger, Idiot's Idiot, Infinite Gesticulator, Pro Bono Closed Captioner and Imaginary Television Host. He has performed, screened and exhibited at museums, microcinemas, film festivals, galleries, bars and barns, including solo presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Portland Art Museum’s Northwest Film Center, Sight Unseen, Spectacle Theater, Artists' Television Access, Lease Agreement, Skylab Gallery and Chicago Filmmakers. In addition to his own work, Jesse programs at the Nightingale Cinema, co-directs the mobile exhibition space and artist bumper sticker project Trunk Show and has programmed work in a wide variety of contexts individually, as a member of Cinema Project and as the peripatetic Deep Leap Microcinema. His writing has appeared in Incite Journal, YA5, OMNI Reboot, Big Big Wednesday, Temporary Art Review, Bad at Sports and Cine-File. A native of Santa Fe, Jesse earned his BA at Bard College and his MFA at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was named a “2014 Breakout Artist” by Newcity and is a 2014-15 Artistic Associate at Links Hall, where he is organizing a week-long festival of artist television in May of 2015.

Co-sponsored by the Hyde Park Arts Center as part of the exhibition Ground Floor (through March 22).