TICKETS $15

Doors 6:30 p.m.; Event 7 p.m.

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THE EXPERIENCE

Fresh off their Portland Art Museum / PICA / Boom Arts-supported project Te Moana Meridian: How the Prime Meridian Shapes the World, and the Case for Relocating It, Portland-based, independent, working-class interdisciplinary artist Sam Hamilton/Sam Tam Ham presents two of their earlier film projects.

ON SCREEN: Apple Pie

2016. Directed by Sam Hamilton. Runtime: 81 minutes. 

Shot on 16mm celluloid across parts of New Zealand and Samoa, interdisciplinary artist Sam Hamilton’s ten-part experimental magnum opus makes thought-provoking connections between life on Earth and the cosmos, and, ultimately, art and science. Structured around the ten most significant celestial bodies of the Milky Way, Apple Pie’s inquiry begins with the furthest point in our solar system, Pluto, as a lens back towards our home planet and the mechanisms by which certain aspects of scientific knowledge are digested, appropriated, and subsequently manifested within the general human complex. Christopher Francis Schiel’s dry, functional narration brings a network of ideas about our existence into focus, while Hamilton’s visual tableaux, as an extension of their multifaceted practice, veer imaginatively between psychedelic imagery and performance art.

SHORT FILM: Everyday For 30 Years Nancy Sat On The Street Corner And Watched The Sunset

2017. Directed by Sam Hamilton. Runtime: 12 minutes. North American premiere.

An homage to Sam Hamilton’s former next-door neighbor in Portland, Oregon—Nancy—and her daily evening ritual. The result is a meditative re-enactment of Nancy’s years-long practice by a group of four teenagers, who sit on the same street corner and watch the sunset. Filmed in anamorphic widescreen on the evening of the summer solstice, the work consists of a single, static long take of 11 minutes and 25 seconds, equivalent to the entire length of a 400-foot 16mm film roll.

ON STAGE: Sam Hamilton

Sam Hamilton/Sam Tam Ham, is an independent working-class interdisciplinary artist from Aotearoa (New Zealand) of Pākehā (English settler colonial) descent based in Portland, Oregon. After 20 years of working independently and professionally across experimental music and sound art, moving and still image, painting, writing, performance, stage, cinema, and curatorial projects, Hamilton’s practice today operates more like an ecology than a discipline. A messy but verdant garden full of old and new growth, hidden places, edible arrangements, toxic weeds, garden parties, frolicking, and most importantly, the life-affirming ferment of deep existential entanglement.

What physically emerges in any given season through the confluence of this garden depends most simply on what vessel/s best serve the idea at hand. The long song a meandering garden path Both an entrance and an exit Hamilton’s work has existed in a wide range of contexts including Converge 45 Biennial, Whitechapel Gallery London, Portland Art Museum, Transmediale Festival Berlin, the NZ International Film Festival, Artspace Aotearoa, a research station in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, an active volcanic island crater, a billboard, a functioning Shinto shrine in Japan, an anarchist squat in Athens Greece, the Australian outback desert, a dank underground parking lot, some dudes apartment in Lima Peru, and on the radio.

In addition to their solo work, they have collaborated extensively with artists across Aotearoa, Sāmoa, Australia, Kiribati, the US, Finland, Japan, and Peru; including 10 years spent working with the internationally acclaimed Lemi Ponifasio MAU Dance Company, touring major works to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Louvre Abu Dhabi, Ruhrtriannale, Berliner Festspiele, KVS, REDCAT, Theatre de la Ville, and more.