Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, ©2008

SD video, stereo sound by Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn 2008

Lost on their way to a desert rock concert, two loners remember the good times.

In this animated line drawing, two birds express complaints and frustrations about their daily lives. Balancing between mundane chores and the hostile environment around them, they dream of better times and places. In a crafty symbolism, the weight of Western capitalism threatens to collapse on their heads.

Landscapes that burn and flood, shift and collapse in an unstable world. Human figures stare at cellphones while floating down the river and falling from the sky. An abstract exploration of the known that becomes unknown, in which animated paintings manifest the uncertainty that surrounds us.

Water drops from the sky, but the mood changes quickly in this brightly coloured animation, created from paintings. A cycle of death and regeneration ensues, to convey the artist’s solidarity with this planet and its people. An escape to freedom prompts some optimism during these strange times.

Ominous moving objects create tension while a ‘happy’ song plays. Stanya Kahn’s morbid, humorous collaboration with painter Llyn Foulkes, whose unique three-dimensional approach serves as an inspiration, features the artist blindfolded, covered with blood and dust, and an original song written and performed by Foulkes.

Don’t Go Back to Sleep is a an experimental narrative film, a haunted tragi-comedy that functions as much as a symbolic meditation on citizen resilience as a metaphor for the violence of the state and the First World’s rapacious impact on the earth, driving the planet itself towards impending death. Shot in Kansas City, Missouri, in newly built homes left uninhabited and unfinished in the economic crash, Don’t Go Back to Sleep follows roving groups of frontline emergency workers adrift in nearly empty, end-times urban and suburban landscapes. Squatting empty suburban developments and luxury high-rises, depressed with the aura of so many displaced by the U.S. housing market catastrophe, nurses and doctors establish make-shift treatment centers within the architectural mundane: fixtures and countertops, carpet pads and exposed wiring, fireplaces and crown molding. As they perform haphazard triage, mostly on each other, we realize they may be the only survivors against a dangerous State.

Stanya Kahn’s Stand in the Stream is a fast-paced digital film about life, death, and the inextricability of the personal from the political. Made over six years and shot on multiple camera formats, it captures candid moments in online chat rooms, in the home, in the wild, and in the streets, following the arc of a mother’s deterioration and death amidst shifting political and digital landscapes. From the birth of a child to the onset of dementia, from Tahrir Square to Standing Rock and Trump’s inauguration, Stand in the Stream is a pulsing and urgent contemporary ode and a call to action.

At first glance, Masters of None could be the home video of a family of neon-pink hooded figures, passing the time with charades, television, and Jiffy Pop on the stove. As in All Together Now, Masters has no dialogue or clear narrative arc, and while the domestic activities seem everyday, they are infused with suggestions of violence and danger.