CAMtastic Newsletter September 2023

From the Dean

 
Dear CAM students and colleagues:
 
I hope your new semester is off to a great start. I am very happy and proud to tell you that the College of Arts and Media at Southern Illinois University Carbondale is launching CAMtastic! This monthly electronic newsletter is to help keep you informed of important happenings and major achievements of our college.
 
In this inaugural issue of the edition for CAM students, faculty and staff, you will get a brief glimpse of numerous amazing things happening in our CAM family. You are cordially invited to submit newsworthy items about you and other CAM members via this link: CAMtastic News Items
 
I would like to take this opportunity to express my heartfelt thanks to the CAM Communication Committee (Mark Stoffel/Chair, Brenna Gallagher, Annie Hammock and Kevin Penrod) for making this publication possible. 
 
Thank you for reading CAMtastic and for contributing to our remarkable college and this much-needed CAM e-publication. Please take care, stay healthy and have a splendid semester.  
 
Best wishes and warmest regards,
 
Hong Cheng, Ph.D.
Dean and Professor
College of Arts and Media
Southern Illinois University Carbondale

School of Art and Design Student Wins Outstanding Sculpture Award

School of Art and Design student Gwen Kelling was honored with The International Sculpture Center’s Outstanding Student Achievement award this year.
 
Kelling says, as a trans woman, her winning sculpture manifests her “ambivalent relationship with womanhood as a simultaneously protective and claustrophobic locus of identity.” The work is called Capacity 1. It creates a “sanctuary” space within a constrictive iron mold drawn from components of an adjustable dress mannequin.
 
“Capacity 1 pits self-care and self-expression against one another,” Kelling said. “To occupy the sculpture's solace is to be immobilized by the parameters of gender expectations, for the armor is too heavy to bear without the frame. This work challenges the concept of gender as an amalgamation of abstract barriers that impede personal growth and vulnerability.”
 
Capacity 1 was included as an installation at Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham, Alabama, for the juried exhibition of the 2023 National Conference on Contemporary Cast Iron Art & Practices.
 
Kelling was one of ten people selected from a field of 182 nominees for The International Sculpture Center’s award.
 
She said she was “grateful and honored” to be selected and was “especially eager for the opportunity to exhibit Capacity 1 in conversation, both verbally and visually, with the other exceptional student artists and artworks that have been selected.”

 

Photojournalism Tenure-track Assistant Professor’s Work Appears in Prestigious Publications Around the Globe

Julia Rendleman has amassed a considerable portfolio of professional publications since she began teaching in the School of Journalism and Advertising last year.
 
Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, ProPublica, The Kentucky Lantern and numerous non-profit publications.
 
Photojournalism has provided me with amazing opportunities and a front-seat to history,” Rendleman said. “It is an absolute privilege to be trusted to tell people's stories. Sometimes the stories are hard, they're sad - and that someone trusts me to get it right and share images from what might be the toughest day of their life - it's just a really precious thing. I hope I can get SIU journalism students excited about that awesome responsibility and privilege.”
 
One of Rendleman’s photos appeared on the front page of the New York Times in July, as part of the article “Abortion Networks Adapt to a Post-Roe World.”
 
“This summer, I met a woman flying across the country - from Minnesota to the East Coast - seeking an abortion. It was the first time she had ever flown. She allowed me into that day of her life,” Rendleman said.
 
When she moved back to Illinois last year, she said, Rendleman knew the state would be “central to the shifting nature” of abortion care.
 
“As a storyteller, I was looking for unique ways to tell the story and came across Elevated Access, an Illinois-based non-profit organization connecting pilots with patients seeking abortions in states where the procedure is illegal: the pilots provide transportation for free,” she said.
 
Rendleman said it was an extremely hard assignment to photograph.
 
“Neither the patient, pilot nor location could be revealed in the images,” she said. “At the same time, my photographs should give readers a sense of what the cross-country journey (and first time the patient was ever on an airplane) looks and feels like and hopefully, gives them a greater understanding of the real-world result of Supreme Court decisions.”
 
Rendleman’s work also appeared on the front page of the Washington Post in August, 2022, in a story following up on a 1997 school shooting in Paducah Kentucky when the gunman became eligible for parole.
 
Photos by Rendleman were heavily featured in a ProPublica article about residents being displaced from HUD housing. The story, written by SoJA’s newly minted investigative journalism  professor Molly Parker, told of the closure of four public housing projects in Cairo, Illinois.
 
Not all of her assignments are so hard-hitting. Rendleman covered numerous topics for a large European news organization: Finland’s Helsingin Sanomat. One story took her to dude ranches in the American West, where she shot still photos and video, including drone footage.
 
“I rode across Montana on horseback for a European outlet, documenting the best American cowboy experience money can buy,” Rendleman said. “In the spring, I went to south Florida for the same European outlet to find out what the American Spring Break experience was all about.  I went several times to Mayfield, Kentucky to document the recovery (and use of recovery funds) after a tornado devastated the area in December, 2021. My camera brought me to all these places.”
 
Rendleman wants her students to be excited by the example of her work.
 
“I'm an SIU alum,” she said. “If I can do it, they can do it too.”
 
Rendleman also wants her students to know there’s no need to despair over the state of journalism and traditional news outlets.
 
“I think there are things to be excited about and stories to tell,” she said. “That's what I want to help Salukis do. I want them to come back in five years and tell me about their summers, riding horseback across the American West, or wherever their stories take them.”

Student to Student

I think my biggest piece of advice to any new student, or just students in general, is to go out and join an RSO (Registered Student Organization).  

Coming in as a new student can be nerve-racking especially whenever you’re coming into a new city with no friends at a brand new school. 
 
Whenever I first came to school here I didn’t have any friends, I didn't know what I wanted to major in, I just moved three hours south of everyone I knew and Covid just ended.  

I was eager to make friends, however trying to get to know people while everyone was still distant and wearing masks was quite an issue.  

So I went to the RSO fair, I looked around and then I saw the table that was covered in a ton of stuff that stood out to me. The club was alt news: 26:46, a club that makes a few episodes a semester that air on PBS/WSIU.

At first I was nervous talking to them because I loved  movies, but had never thought about how to make one or even really picked up a camera. But they assured me I didn't need any experience to join.  
So I did and I loved every second of it. They taught me all the basics of camera work, lighting, editing, and script writing and then I pitched an idea and we shot it. I helped produce my first interview segment where we followed a band from my home town up to Chicago to watch their performance. 

The trip we took made a huge impact on me being able to do something I loved with people I really enjoyed being around and knowing I could make a career out of it. After that, I changed my major and I found even more friends.  

Since then, I have joined the staff, and I’ve acquired a lot of experience that I might not have had in classes. I've been a part of three episodes. I've done countless interviews and worked on more creative works as well. It feels as though I finally found a place to highlight my ideas.

I’ve met a bunch of cool individuals and set up relationships with people that were once standing in my exact position who do incredible things like directing saturday night live or help create set dec for award winning movies.

So if I can encourage you to do anything with your time here, it would be to go out, try an RSO, get to know some people and you might just find your place here at SIU!

 

Visiting Filmmaker Ai Chamberlain

Thursday, October 5, 2023, 9:35am to 10:50am

Ai Chamberlain will visit the Media Arts Foundations course, CIN 361 New Media Now, and we will screen some work and have a discussion with students after.

There will be a public screening and interview/discussion later in the day 1pm to 3:50pm. Dr. Finley Freibert’s course CIN 469 / MCMA 552 Queer Visual Culture course will be required to attend.

The Artist has provided the following:

Anne Chamberlain began her decades long career in American Higher Education, after writing, producing and directing a series of underground film classics that have stood the test of time. Her award winning series of 16mm and analog video shorts released between 1987 and 1997, have been exhibited at film festivals around the world, and are now held in the Legacy Project collection at the University of California at Los Angeles Archive. Chamberlain’s pioneering contributions to the field of gender theory that followed in the 1990s, and to online education in the 2000s, have become universal.

Chamberlain used media to tackle the “intersectionality” of gender, race, class, sexuality, et al
in celluloid films and analog videos such as A Feminist Film 1988, Burden of Dykes 1994, and Tales of the Pit 1997. Her Masters Thesis Exhibition at Southern Illinois University in 1995 anticipated both the Black Lives Matter and MeToo Movements, tackling “white silence” in the musical Ride on Rosa, and sexual assault in Thelma & Louise Don’t Live Here Anymore.

Premenstrual 1992, stands out in film archiving, for Chamberlain’s use of human DNA as the source of the image ‘emulsion.’ In the heyday of the New Queer Cinema, Condomnation 1992 was one of the first films to address the subject of female invisibility in the AIDS pandemic.

After moving to California in 1995 she began a freelance career, working both behind and in front of the camera, on sets and also in post-production. Chamberlain’s work as a videographer catered to live theatre documentation and Reality TV, while she also served the analog film community with her knowledge of negative cutting, A&B rolling, and sound conforming. She gained entry into the Screen Actors Guild (SAG/AFTRA), when the late Top Gun director Tony Scott cast her in the feature film Domino in 2004. Roles directed by notables including Brian Cranston, Jamie Babbitt and Jonathan X followed. While married to a working film and television actor, she became a ‘spy’ in Hollywood, visiting sets and reporting back to students in her courses, with further observations on a range of industry practices.

In addition to her media making activities, Chamberlain helped launch the field of Queer Studies while teaching at The Harvey Milk Institute, and City College of San Francisco in the late 1990s. While helming a course called History of Homosexuality in Film at C.C.S.F., she authored and successfully shepherded new class proposals such as “Contemporary Queer Film” and “70s Queer Cinema,” through the tangled approval process. Though the subject 2matter is now standard across academia, Chamberlain’s syllabi were conjured without models, in a time when the topics were offered nowhere else. The very first course that was housed within the emerging Women’s Studies Department at C.C.S.F., “Women & Film,” was also created through Chamberlain’s efforts.

As an educator in this century, she went on to invent virtual classroom designs, transferring on
campus experiences to global online platforms that became the institutional standard at Academy of Art University in San Francisco and beyond. Mastery of both filmmaking and film studies led to teaching a wide array of subjects, ranging from media theory to production techniques. In 2007, Chamberlain began authoring online course content at AAU, designing entirely new approaches to eduction in courses such as “Motion Picture Theory & Style,” “Cinematography,” “Documentary,” “Women Directors” & “The Beatles in the Visual Arts.

The Moving Image Archive at Indiana University recently commissioned the IU Alumnus to make a short film on celluloid stock in celebration of the 100th Anniversary of 16mm in 2023. This revival of interest in analog film also brought Chamberlain to rural Lithuania for retrospective screenings in 2019, and the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles hosted her work later that year. An accomplished musician, she used the recent pandemic lockdown to compose a feature length musical, encompassing all of the themes of her art and teaching.

1) Link to my IMDB page - https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2218314/
2) Link for 2019 Echo Park Film Center Retrospective, Los Angeles CA
3) Link to listing for Cinema Camp Film Festival, Salos Lithuania
(the text is in Lithuanian, but you can see my photo and program notes in context) -
https://zygimantasjancoras.wixsite.com/kinostovykla2018
4) Links to UCLA Out in Public “Tales of the Pit” panel discussion,
and virtual screening details.
https://vimeo.com/445373921/f1fd0c80e0
https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/events/2020/08/07/out-in-public