Cultivate Screening!
Leah Clare Michaels- I Love Women Who Shame the Family
Mat Keel and Liz Lessner- Secretion: A New Translation of the Sublime
February 25, 7 PM EST, Cultivate Studios
4218 Howard Avenue, Kensington, MD
Mat Keel and Liz Lessner, still from Secretion: A New Translation of the Sublime, 2023
Leah Clare Michaels, still from I Love Women Who Shame the Family
About Leah Clare Michaels: Leah Clare Michaels is a Baltimore native, artist, activist, historian, writer, and surfer. Her practice is informed by her background in social Catholic feminist circles. She has produced documentary film, multi-media installation, and performance works rooted in historical research and in the space where social justice, art, and cultural exchange intersect.
Michaels has taught and presented in the United States, Europe, and Asia including an international tour of her feature documentary Rock, Rage & Self-Defense: An Oral History of Seattle’s Home Alive, which she co-directed with friend and colleague Rozz Therrien. Her written work has appeared in UMBC Magazine and the Debutante Journal based in Edinburgh, Scotland. She is currently teaching film and cinema studies at Towson University and Anne Arundel Community College. During her residency at the 2022 Cultivate/La Baldi Residency program, she concentrated on developing film using eco-processes and local natural materials.
About Mat Keel: Mat Keel (b. 1975) is a researcher and artist whose work with paranoid-critical geopolitics, ethnography, still and moving digital image, sculpture and text explores trauma as political violence, focusing on the role of non-ordinary states of consciousness, particularly dissociation, and reintegration with pre-colonial mind. He received a B.A. in Geography from U-Mass Amherst, an M.A. in Geography from UCLA and did pre-doctoral research at Bristol University (UK). He is currently finishing a Ph.D. in Geography and Anthropology around themes closely related to his studio art.
About Liz Lessner: Liz Lessner (b. 1982) is a sculptor whose work combines traditional fabrication techniques and emerging technologies to create novel sensory experiences. Her sculptures stage encounters that reframe common occurrences and routine happenings. Solo shows include VisArts (Rockville, MD), Honfleur Gallery (WDC), Big Orbit, a Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Arts Project Space (Buffalo, NY), and University of Oregon’s Eric Washburne Gallery. She has also exhibited nationally and internationally at A.I.R. gallery (Brooklyn, NY), The CrossLab for Innovation and Prototyping at the University of Fortaleza, Brazil, Guapamacátaro Center for Art and Ecology in Michoacán, and Everard Read’s Circa Gallery in Cape Town. She has an M.F.A. in Media Study from the University at Buffalo.