MORUS- Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space

Le Petit Versailles welcomes the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space for two days of film/video screenings.

Monday 8/4 @ Le Petit Versailles, 8pm
LISPENARD LADDER/CONTACT MICS WITH CARA
Directed by Andrea Callard

Andrea Callard is a collage maker working in film, video, sound as well as photography, installation, and drawing. Her early work looked at nature in the city. Her films have screened at museums, festivals, and symposia around the world. In 1980, Callard assembled the lobby of The Times Square Show, a seminal exhibition by Collaborative Projects. Currently Callard produces media for Green Planet 21, documenting and promoting their industrial recycling and sustainability initiatives.

RESTORING THE APPEARANCE TO ORDER
1975, 10 minutes, color

VIRGIN BEAUTY ON LUDLOW
1989/2009, 19 minutes, color and black/whtie
Directed by Coleen Fitzgibbon

Coleen Fitzgibbon is an experimental film artist based in NYC. She was involved with the collaborative filmmaking and arts groups X+Y and Collaborative Projects, Inc during the late 1970s. In RESTORING THE APPEARANCE TO ORDER, the filmmaker performs her solitary act of cleaning. A static camera tightly frames the studio sink, dirty with paint and other residue while the artist engages in a concerted ritual of scrubbing and scraping… a treatise on the over-cleanliness of certain reductivist gestures in the history of art making. In VIRGIN BEAUTY ON LUDLOW, persons unknown wait on a street in a large city for something to come their way. Shot on the Lower East Side in the late 1980s, the film captures a day of black marketeers in the street waiting for action. Coleen’s film LES appeared in the inaugural MoRUS Film Fest.

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Tuesday 8/5 @ Le Petit Versailles, 8pm
NOTES ON AILANTHUS
Directed by Andrea Callard

Andrea Callard is a collage maker working in film, video, sound as well as photography, installation, and drawing. Her early work, including NOTES ON AILANTHUS, looked at nature in the city. The film stems from the filmmaker’s interest in Ailanthus altissima. An ancient and successful plant, this tree grows very fast, thrives in distressed environments, and is difficult to eliminate. It has been very popular as well as feared illustrating some ridiculous group thinking in the public life of America. The filmmaker used pieces of this history to make many art works in various media during the late 1970s. This excerpt was cut from a reel edited during 1978-79.

FISH UNDER DELANCEY
Directed by Kelly Spivey
2006, 26 minutes, 16mm

Kelly Spivey has been making experimental films since 1998. Her films explore themes of class, gender, and women’s roles. Her work has screened nationally and internationally and has won various awards. The tunneling of the subways beneath the city, the people who ride the subway, and the slogan, “If you see something, say something”, inspired the stop-motion, eavesdropping, dreamlike journey film, FISH UNDER DELANCEY. Traveling from Flushing to Manhattan via the subway, as well as throughout NYC, the filmmaker became entranced by the tile murals that line many subway platforms. The film also follows the poet and writer Eileen Myles on parts of the journey.

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Opened in December 2012, MoRUS is a fully volunteer-run and staffed non-profit history museum and living archive of urban activism that aims to preserve grassroots activist history in the East Village and promote environmentally-sound community-based urban ecologies. Housed in the storefront of C Squat, MoRUS is open Tuesdays and Thursdays through Sunday from 11:00 AM to 7:00 PM. Also showcasing the unique public spaces and community gardens for which the neighborhood is renowned, MoRUS offers walking tours every Saturday and Sunday at 3:00 PM. For more information visit www.morusnyc.org.

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Le Petit Versailles events are made possible by Allied Productions, Inc., Gardeners & Friends of LPV, GreenThumb/NYC Dept. of Parks, Materials for the Arts, and the NYC Dept. of Cultural Affairs. LPV Exhibitions are made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.