The Jettisoned

A three-channel video installation by Meredith Zielke and Yoni Goldstein

Opening Reception: Saturday, December 17th, 7-10pm
Second Screening: Thursday, December 22nd, 7-9pm
Exhibition runs until December 23rd, 2011

“These bodily fluids…are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit — cadere, cadaver.” – Julia Kristeva

In three sweeping tableaux vivants, artists Yoni Goldstein and Meredith Zielke present a rich cartography of identity at its most nebulous form. The rigid boundaries erected by conventional interpretations of collective, conditional, and bodily identities are torn down in The Jettisoned: bodily mechanisms present sickness and health as being part of the same process of sustained loss; anachronistic renditions of epic gestures deplete the national epic of its definitive qualities; crypto-judaic ritual offers veiled signs of a heritage while simultaneously dissolving it into another religious tradition. Fittingly, The Jettisoned engages these interstitial spaces with an equally nebulous aesthetic approach, a filmic rendering of the painterly tradition of the tableaux. However solitary and ambiguous the sites it explores are, The Jettisoned offers the possibility of abject recognition.

The tableaux vivants, or living paintings, that constitute The Jettisoned were shot in Chicago, Warsaw, and Mexico City. The carefully considered set design incorporates authentic elements of both the location and tradition addressed in each tableau. The Mexico tableau for instance, incorporates genuine Masonic garb and other crypto-Judaic artifacts with a Mexican working class altar to a flower covered Y-chromosomal Aaron, otherwise known as the “Jewish Gene”. The Warsaw tableau is placed in a large animal surgical theater, with Polish locals positioned as manipulated monuments and figures from national epics. In the Chicago tableau, Goldstein and Zielke’s childhood memories from Netanya, Israel and Detroit, USA combine within viscous, fluid seepages inside a former industrial soap factory.

Artist Biographies:

Yoni Goldstein is an Israeli born, Chicago based filmmaker, cinematographer, and editor whose work puts forward multi-sited transects of body, conflict, and diaspora. Developing multilayered approaches to the documentary, Goldstein has gone on to work on a number of socially critical film projects: from examining hybridized healing practices in the Northern Andes (La Curación) to critical visualizations of trauma and disembodiment (G-Loc: Vivid Dreamlets / Beautiful Places). His films have circulated in numerous regional, national, and international festivals, conferences, and galleries. Goldstein received an MFA in Film Video and New Media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009. 

Meredith Zielke is a socially critical and community oriented filmmaker, photographer, educator and activist. She has undertaken topics such as collective memory and body identity in Crypto-Judaic history (The Jettisoned), the effective process of dialogue in confronting the Israel/Palestine conflict (Zeitouna), prismatic notions of body in Ecuador (La Curación), and alternatives in Detroit public education (Our School). Zielke received an MFA in Film Video and New Media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010.

In the summer of 2004, Yoni Goldstein and Meredith Zielke founded Standing Point Films as a vehicle for socially critical and community oriented film art production.

Download the Press Release.