Nika Kaiser: Sonoran Sea

Join us Saturday, May 17th from 7-9pm for a screening of Nika Kaiser’s Sonoran Sea.

During the reception and in conversation with the video installation a ceremonial drink– a soft limpia– offered and created by T will be available at the bar.

“Wow what a generosity it is for road to be open and us to be able, to create paths with what we have in front of us- not forward not back to, but a secret direction…that might render us reunited not with what remains; but with what persists. Grasp tightly to the remembering- not remembering: past but remembering:present. The senses as a modality for communication and transportation. To imbibe and not BE THERE, but BE WITH. To create (re:will) it on purpose.”

About the film:

Threshold: Sonoran Sea
Two-Channel Video Installation
17:22
2018

Threshold: Sonoran Sea is an immersive two-channel video installation screened as a single channel work at Pidgin Palace Arts. Set in coastal Sonora, Mexico at the meeting of the ocean and desert, a narrative of human and animal transference takes place as viewers move through two opposing projections that situate them centrally within a surreal threshold between water and land.
Navigating an isolated coastal landscape at the precipice of anthropocentric destruction, a woman traverses bleached architecture and beach dunes in solitude, encountering a supernatural figure, dolphins, and water birds engaging in tenuous conditions of survival. Set amidst the meeting of two environments (desert and ocean) that both bare the limits and expanses of the edges of a human-centric reality, Threshold: Sonoran Sea is a speculative folktale of a near-future where endings become beginnings.

This work was made possible with an Arts Foundation New Works Project Grant.

About Nika:

Nika Kaiser is a visual artist working with photography, video, and installation. Her art practice deploys a meeting of the imaginary and the real to explore ideas of deep time, interspecies connection, anti-capitalism, future ecologies, and is informed by her upbringing in the Sonoran borderlands. Kaiser holds an MFA in Visual Art from the University of Oregon. Her work has been exhibited internationally and she has been the recipient of numerous awards, including two Arts Foundation New Works Grants, a Warhol Foundation Grant, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship. She performs as one half of the experimental sound and video project Alluvium, who create site-specific pieces archiving the natural world’s fluctuating conditions. She is a member of the international video collective Ungrund and an alumni of Ditch Projects in Springfield, Oregon. Kaiser teaches Experimental Practices in the Department of Film and Television at the University of Arizona.

Artist page: