OCFF: Regarding
- April 3-6 2025
- Gallery hours 4-6PM / Sidewalk viewing 6-10PM
Archive
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Regarding, co-presented with the Onion City Experimental Film Festival, installs one video from a Chicago artist each evening of the festival in Leisure’s street-facing gallery. Meticulously observed scenes of everyday objects, settings, and activities provide a focused subjectivity towards the expansive haze of the world. At times lingering, at times fleeting, these videos consider the internal domestic in constant exchange with external infrastructures, imbuing the public and quotidian with renewed intimacy and attention. Regarding is curated in collaboration with Onion City programmers Nicky Ni and Elise Schierbeek.
Videos will be on view inside with sound during gallery hours from 4-6PM and outside without sound from 6-10PM.
Artists & Films
April 3: City Tissue Slices by Yongfeng Fu
US / 2024 / 12 min / @fireofire_ff
A slow burning and impressionistic gaze through a downtown Chicago window.
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Yongfeng Fu jumps into the filmmaking and art world with an engineering background from Guangzhou, China. Currently based in Chicago, he focuses on narrative films while also exploring documentary, experimental 3D projects, and video game work.
April 4: Fantasia (The Weary Wheel) by Brett Swenson
US / 2024 / 10 min / @brett_swenson
An exploration of the reproductive fantasies of suburban middle class American life that draws strange slants of meaning out of quotidian affairs.
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Brett Swenson makes videos and objects that explore the felt mechanics of seeing and perceiving. He’s especially interested in the sticky relationship between surfaces and interiors, and in how these elements can physically rework each other to create new and relationally expressive forms. Brett is based in Chicago, and has exhibited both nationally and internationally. He earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the University of Chicago. He is currently a Lecturer in the Art Department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
April 5: Glistening Seagull by Chae Yu
South Korea / 2024 / 11 min / chaejungyu.com / @ceejaeyu
A dream-like Super 8 travelogue whisking together landscapes, faces, keepsakes, and debris.
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Chae Yu is based in Seoul, South Korea, and is interested in experiencing different expressive positions in sound and image. Her films trace the rhythmic continuity of bodily gestures, exploring how they connect with transient places where relationships between individuals dissolve.
April 6: at the bamboo green by Xiaolu Wang
China/US / 2024 / 12 min / hellox140lu.com
The filmmaker’s visit to their grandmother’s grave in Hui Muslim tradition at the foot of China’s Helan Mountains. Shot on cellphone in one continuous take, the film accentuates an in-between: visiting from America, the space of chant, and a tension generated by the camera’s presence.
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Xiaolu Wang (b. 1991, Yinchuan) documents, curates, translates, maps interiority, mixes video, poetry, memory, and translations through a decolonial lens. They seek, feel, get lost, and fly kites. Suspended in between places and metaphorical landscapes, they search for a way of being that embodies vagueness and precision simultaneously.
