9 minutes of Kaunaus

A film by Dani Restack

A Hand in Two Ways (Fisted), is a looping meditation on night as space of mysterious energetic transmissions. Animals, human bodies, children, ritual and performance are investigated as zones of conflict, desire and a visceral movement that is more felt than seen.

The third part of a trilogy regarding "feral domesticity," following "Strangely Ordinary This Devotion" (2017) and "Come Coyote" (2019).

A global portrait documenting the year's events, Cinetracts '20 features the work of an international lineup of 20 filmmakers. Capturing the zeitgeist in their own backyard, the artists' short films are the culmination of a year-long residency project.

16mm to video. Five 16mm black and white silent films transferred to video and projected onto eighteen foot long vellum banners. A fan blows the vellum which makes the projections spill onto the walls and floor. There is one unifying sound track of peeper frogs (Pseudacris crucifer) singing their mating call.

“A soldier’s trip to Syria is complicated when he accidentally impregnates a friend. Meanwhile, a horse breeder from Ohio is driven away from home by her own desire to become pregnant. In Hard as Opal the lines between truth and fiction, fact and fantasy, are reined in and treated not as fixed, divisive markers but as malleable threads of narrative potential. Buckhiester and Leventhal perform alongside other non-actors who are filmed in their own varying domestic and professional environments. The result is a rich accumulation of narratives held together by questions concerning the nature of objectification, loneliness, and dissociative fantasy.”—Brett Price

In Dani Leventhal’s Platonic, geometric specters twirl in space; pet cats foam at the mouth; a little boy mistakes his junkie dad for a superhero; and a confused adolescent worries he has sired a centaur.

In Dani’s Leventhal’s latest video we are invited along on a house visit with a familial group. There’s trash in the garden, guns on the sofa, and martial arts in the living room. A photo session records a young woman throwing punches at a man, playacting for the camera, but sweating anyway.

In Shayne's Rectangle, Dani Leventhal's moving and mysterious prayer for healing, a horse farm and a casual poolside dissection are the nodes between which a series of patiently taken sharp turns maneuver through moods both intimate and detached. The camera pursues, observes, offers, reflects, and is reflected. Things clear and things indistinct interact rhythmically, resonantly, producing a volatile and haunting visual prosody. -- Jeremy Hoevenaar

Sister City channels moments of paradoxical experience--of being a superhero or being for sale--into reverberant conduits, articulating a nature divided by panes of glass or suspended in watery solitudes. Each shift begets a kind of origin story: one encounter traces the specific azure of a James Turrell installation to a pet shop jellyfish, in another, a modern-day putto purifies a horrific tale by blowing bubbles in a tub. Sister City, like water, seeks its own level; cresting and displacing continuous bursts of life spiritualized, succulent, and ultimately alone. -Deirtra Thompson