Chicago-based filmmaker, CalArts alum, and 2014 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts recipient Deborah Stratman (Film/Video MFA 95) presents two consecutive film programs in Los Angeles this week: one on Wednesday, July 19 at The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and another on Thursday, July 20 at 2220 Arts + Archives.
At the Academy Museum’s Ted Mann Theater, Stratman will appear in person to present You & Me & the Cosmos Makes Three: An Evening with Deborah Stratman. The Wednesday program of Stratman’s films—running 74 minutes total—includes:
- “Second Sighted” (2014)
- “Laika” (2021)
- “…These Blazeing Starrs!” (2011)
- Last Things (2023) [recently screened at this year’s Sundance Film Festival]
More about the program from the Academy Museum:
[Stratman’s] filmic works represent an artistic practice spent in wide-eyed seeking: of humans and our place in the universe, of humanity’s impact on the environment, of physical and intangible remnants of our past. Working with footage and ephemera found in various state and institutional collections, including the Chicago Film Archives and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories, Stratman’s films stretch beyond our earthbound existence to consider human beings as so much more than star stuff, as just one part of the universe’s greater whole.
Stratman joins Los Angeles Filmforum and Rotations the following day to present Deborah Stratman: Framed Views: The Illinois Parables and more. The program includes Stratman’s The Illinois Parables (2016), “Optimism” (2018), and “For the Time Being” (2021), as well as Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson’s “Mono Lake” (1968-2004).
Stratman is a filmmaker, artist, and educator whose recent projects investigate themes ranging from freedom to surveillance to extinction. Considering sound as “the ultimate multi-tool” and time as a supernatural state, her work explores “how places, ideas, and society are intertwined.” Stratman’s films have screened and been awarded at various international festivals and venues, including Centre Pompidou in Paris, Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the 2019 Art of the Real Nonfiction Film Festival, Viennale 2016, the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.
