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Media Arts Preview: Blue Movies, Chinese Video and Speculative Futures

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Agnieszka Brzezanska

Thursday, January 27
Polish artist Agnieszka Brzezanska brings photographs, paintings and a video projection to Michael Benevento in a show called 852 Hz. The projects center on dance, rhythms and the female body, and in particular, the artist's Blue Movie borrows Blondie's "Heart of Glass" as the soundtrack for a rumination on bodies, dance, pornography and Warhol's film of the same title, creating a "wary yet playful deconstruction of a very complicated genre of representation." Open through March 4.Friday, January 28
Based on Micol Hebron's column in LA art magazine X-TRA, which itself references Agnes Varda's similar event from 1983, X-TRA'S 1 Image 1 Minute show features artists showing a photograph that is particularly significant to them for one minute. The event takes place at the Ray Kurtzman Theater at Creative Artists Agency, with a reception starting at 7:00 p.m., and the show starting at 8:00 p.m.

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Saturday, January 29
The Getty Center presents Video Art From the New China, with work by a range of artists, including Cao Fei and Sun Xun, alongside pioneering artists such as Zhang Peili and Zhang Huan. The show includes performance, documentary, and fiction, and is linked to the Getty's exhibition "Photography From the New China"; it starts at 4:00 p.m. in the Harold M. Williams Auditorium. A second show starts at 7:00 p.m. and presents the first and last installments of Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest by Yang Fudong.

Made Up

Art Center's Media Design Program presents a lecture series and an exhibition titled Made Up: Design's Fictions.The event kicks off with presentations by designer Fiona Raby, writer and futurist Bruce Sterling and curator Tim Durfee, who all promise to discuss "tactical anachronisms, designing for ambiguous reality, and the re-emergence of speculative practice in the 21st century." The exhibition features a long list of artists, including Ben Hooker/Shona Kitchen, Eddo Stern, Julia Tsao and many others.Jim Ovelmen and Barry Markowitz present a show of projected video works both inside and outside Cal State University LA's Fine Arts Gallery. Titled Universe City, the show's goal is to connect people with both video art and the CSULA campus. Artists participating in the show, up through February 26, include Corey Fogel, Natasa Prosenc, Jesse Robinson, Joel Tauber and Liz Young. The opening reception is from 6:00 - 9:00 p.m. tonight at the CSULA Fine Arts Gallery.

Reality Relax

The opening reception for Reality/Relax, a double projection video piece by D'Ette Nogle that draws on Dan Graham's performance Lax/Relax from 1969, takes place tonight from 6:00 - 8:00 at Parker Jones Gallery. The show is open until March 5.Sunday, January 30
Filmforum presents its 35th Anniversary show by honoring Kodak's Kodachrome, the film stock favored by archivists for its stability and by artists for its warm color treatment. Films to be screened include work by Stan Brakhage, Phil Solomon and Michael Kuchar, who will show the 1966 film The Secret of Wendel Samson; Kuchar will be in attendance. The screening and reception are at the Spielberg Theater at the Egyptian, and the event starts at 7:30.

Machine Project

Monday, January 31
The final event in MOCA's Artist's Museum exhibition is a screening at 8:00 p.m. in MOCA's Ahmanson Auditorium of a film covering the eccentric activities of the wonderful art space Machine Project. Directed by Chris Wilcha, the film covers typical Machine Project fare: an "experimental women's choir, a drum solo spilling out the second story window, a parent-child car theft workshop, a talk by Jason Brown revealing the secrets of Los Angeles's occult netherworlds, and a demonstration of paleolithic fire starting technology." Tickets here.

Sustaining Communities

Scholars, cultural theorists and artists gather together for Sustaining Communities: Forging Collective Memories in another installment of the Big City Forum series. The event takes place at Cal State LA's University Student Union from 4:30 - 6:30 p.m., and participants include Elizabeth Chin, David Shorter, Kianga Ford and Ari Kletzky.

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