Media/video artist Christine Kirouac presents at Off the Map tonight

This evening, the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center and the Media Arts Project will host an Off The Map artist talk with Christine Kirouac. The Greensboro-based media/video artist will be discussing the methods of production, both personal and collaborative, that formulate her video work and installations. Kirouac’s work blends cinematic, documentary and theatrical video techniques to broadcast personal revelations and social observations.

Off The Map is an artists lecture series produced and presented by The Media Arts Project, an Asheville-based arts education and outreach organization.

BMC+AC is located downtown, at 56 Broadway. The event costs $7 and begins at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are available at the door. For more information visit www.themap.org.

Here are full details from The MAP:

The Media Arts Project presents an Off The Map artist talk with Greensboro-based video artist Christine Kirouac on Tuesday, Nov. 13 at BMCM+AC. Samples of Kirouac’s work will be screened and the artist will discuss her interdisciplinary approach to art-making, and moving between self-produced work and collaboration.

Born in Canada, Kirouac is an award-winning media artist whose videos and installations move between enigmatic acts of personal revelation and social observation, blending elements of cinema, theater and documentary, evoking uneasy reactions of empathy, humor and pain.

Kirouac’s media installations and videos have been exhibited in galleries and screened at film and video festivals throughout Canada, the Southern United States, Paris, Lisbon, London, Belfast and most recently the 4th Cairo International Video Festival in Egypt. This year, her new video “Don’t Go Away” was short-listed as a finalist for New Frontiers at Sundance Film Festival. Her videos, Hybred and Introduction were featured in The Asheville Art Museum’s Prime Time exhibit last Spring.

Off the MAP lectures are presented by The Media Arts Project and offer insightful talks by visual artists and performers who infuse conceptual approaches to art-making with new technology and traditional media. Off The Map lectures create a forum for artists and engage the community in a broader arts dialogue. Past speakers have included local artists like Nava Lubelski, Heather Lewis and Bridget Conn.

Watch videos by Kirouac:

From celebration to squabbles, food serves as a microcosm for the push/pull of family dynamics. Includes footage of Kirouac’s father’s cooking show (One of the first televised cooking shows on CBC) spliced with footage of actors Kirouac hired to play herself.

Don’t Go Away from Christine Kirouac on Vimeo.

Playing upon the audience’s memory of the popular fiction, Lord of the Rings, Kirouac carefully mimics Cate Blanchett’s melodramatic narration, imitating her accent and round wispy articulation. However, her initially faithful recitation grows incoherent as multiple layers of this narrative become entangled with one another in a series of echoes and overlaps, speaking to the unfulfilled tease of cinema.

Introduction from Christine Kirouac on Vimeo.

Video/performance that is simultaneously abstract and visceral, “Canadian Time 2” brings life to the physical and psychological anxieties of statehood as Kirouac wrestles with the tenuous status of living as an ”alien” in the U.S. under strict and at times nonsensical immigration rules.

Canadian Time 2 from Christine Kirouac on Vimeo.