fragments: films by Emily Chao

Screenings & Films

fragments: films by Emily Chao

Bay Area Now 9 Looping Film Program |

January 3–31, 2023, 11 AM-5 PM

Spanning six years of filmmaker Emily Chao’s methodic practice, this program features a cycle of four films that offer fragments of memories of people and places, experiences both shared and private, and new considerations of familiar views. Her work, a blend of non-fiction, observational, and structural sensibilities, captures moments of delicate beauty and intimacy and the haunting strangeness of place and history.

Program

No Land (1 minute, 16mm to digital, silent, 2019)
“A darkly mysterious landscape study. The infiltration of natural space.” —Steve Polta
This film is dedicated to Black Hole Collective Film Lab.

chive pockets (3 minutes, 16mm to digital, silent, 2017)
A 16mm film documenting Chao’s grandmother making chive pockets for the last time.

As Long As There Is Breath (2 minutes, 16mm to digital, color, sound, 2020)
An assembly of collected memories shatter the interior and open portals to the outside.
Completed during shelter-in-place in Northern California. Commissioned by Small Press Traffic.

Light Signal (11 minutes, 16mm to digital, color, sound, 2022)
A keeper’s log, a score for light, a script for sound. A reconstruction, a slow reclamation. To begin where there is light.

Emily Chao

Emily Chao is a filmmaker based in the Bay Area. Her films have screened at the Viennale, IFFR, Sheffield DocFest, BAMPFA, MoMI, Wexner Center for the Arts, and more. She is a co-programmer of Light Field, an international exhibition of recent and historical moving image art on celluloid held in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a founding member of Black Hole Collective Film Lab in Oakland, CA. She is from San Jose, CA and earned her MFA in Film/Video at the California Institute of the Arts.

Gina Basso

Gina Basso is a San Francisco-based independent film programmer of experimental, artist-made, and non-fiction film and video works and thematic narrative film series. She has organized film programs for local cinemas including The Roxie Theater, The Castro Theater, and Alamo Drafthouse New Mission Theater. She has curated programs for McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Design Within Reach, Hunter’s Point Shipyard and the Northwest Film Forum and is the former film curator for San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In her creative practice, she uses video to explore transitional or altered states of being. Through moving collage, handmade animation, and sound she draws on a rich tradition of experimentation with various forms, materials, and processes, combining found and original footage to harness the energy of poetic montage. Her video work has been presented at CROSSROADS Festival, Artist Television Access, HAXAN Film Festival, and Antimatter Experimental Film Festival.

Bay Area Now 9 is curated by Martin Strickland, Director of Curatorial Initiatives, and Fiona Ball, independent curator; under the artistic leadership of Amy Kisch, Head of Art + Public Programming; and developed with the inaugural YBCA Curatorial Counsel of curators, artists, activists, and cultural workers working across the Bay Area’s creative disciplines and communities: Erina Alejo, Gina Basso, Jason Bayani, Mina Girgis, Candace Huey, José Ome Navarrete Mazatl, Aay Preston Myint, and Lehua Taitano.

The BAN9 YBCA project team also includes Yoni Asega, Manager of Exhibition Design; David Tim, Head Preparator, Project Design; Bella Manfredi, Senior Preparator, Multimedia + Graphics; O Soo Vegh, Exhibition Project Manager + Registrar; Rea Lynn de Guzman, Manager of Public + Educational Programs; Flavia Mora, Public + Educational Programs Coordinator; and Cori Lucas, Community + Program Event Manager.

YBCA is grateful to the preparator team who made this exhibition possible: Isaiah Acosta, Amy Bergstein, Micha Dudgeonwood, Owen Goodwin, German Hoyle, Calvin Jones, Linden Julien-Lehr, Lauren Kenwood, Benjamin Leon, Maren Mouhanna, Éamon McGivern, Christian Neill, David Prigge, and Kelsey Westphal.

YBCA Programs are made possible in part by the City and County of San Francisco, MacKenzie Scott, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC), #StartSmall, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Marilyn Conrad Trust, New England Foundation for the Arts, California Arts Council, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, William G. Irwin Charity Foundation, The Bernard Osher Foundation, The Sato Foundation, Gaia Fund, Office of Mayor London N. Breed, San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development, Headlands Center for the Arts, ICA San Francisco, Bay Area Mind and Music Society, GitHub, Harvey and Leslie Wagner Foundation, McNabb Foundation, Raymond James Charitable, Savant Group Charitable Foundation, The Building Works, Fremont Group Foundation, and YBCA Members.

Lead image: Light Signal (Emily Chao; 2022). Courtesy of Emily Chao.