George Kuchar, Tamy Ben-Tor, Emily Clayton, and Keren Cytter

Revenant Cri Sis 

CICCIO is proud to present Revenant Cri Sis a screening of four videos by George Kuchar, Keren Cytter, Tamy Ben-Tor, and Emily Clayton. The selected works were all made with footage from trips made by the artists visiting family back home. Alongside the videos Ciccio has made a sculpture to hold the projector with a mattress and seating for visitors to lounge on while watching the videos.

Creeping Crimson (1987), by the late George Kuchar, depicts the artist’s trip home to the Bronx to visit his mother in the hospital. Kuchar lived most of his adult life in San Francisco. Kuchar’s irreverent immediate presence which he depicts so well in his diaristic videos, persists even while his mother is sick in the hospital bed next to him. 

In Young Emerging Artists Eating and Fucking, Tamy Ben-Tor mixes vignettes of characters she performs in her studio with footage of a family trip back to Jerusalem, where she grew up. Using masks and wigs Ben-Tor creates characters that are a hysteric embodiment of the language of the international art world and other mainstream currents. The clips of her family are sweet, intimate scenes of comical and absurd normal activities. These scenes are also the source material from her husband and artist, Miki Carmi’s practice. The every day behavior Ben-Tor records becomes a manifestation of perversities when juxtaposed with texts from the art world, Hebrew and yiddish limericks, and film reviews. 

Emily Clayton returns to her home in rural West Tennessee in In the Life (2019), where she documents the life of her mother, a retired sixth-grade school teacher and an addict. In the Life centers in and around her mother’s modest home, which has become a hideaway for her boyfriend James and other transient young men. Emily’s camera use is sober and noninvasive. Clayton stops filming when asked and respects closed doors. The eerie sense of being a visitor of a place in crisis looms in the whispers and the references to unexplained events in the dialogue. Clayton’s family and house guests seem to all be waiting for an event that has yet to happen. Yet, through sharp editing cuts and the use of the audio of voicemail from friends back in NY, Clayton reminds us that she is only a visitor and these peoples lives will continue on here without her. 

In Des Trous (2018) Keren Cytter comes at us with a voice over in French that guides us through a trip back to Israel to attend her sister’s wedding. The narrator’s estranged melancholic thoughts and meandering side stories create a detached perspective. This historic trait made famous by New Wave French cinema, becomes a form for the phantom that can’t fully be there where it once lived. 

"Nous sommes des fantômes 

nous empreintes laissent de marques sur la langue que vous parlez

 nos pencées laissent empreintes de pas au sol"  

George Kuchar (1945 New York, - 2011 San Francisco, CA.) was an acclaimed “underground” film maker and video artist. He taught at the San Francisco art Institute from 1971 - 2011. His videos and films have been shown internationally including but not limited to Moma; Moma ps1; SF Moma; The Whitney Museum; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; Spielberg Theater at the Egyptian; Anthology Film Archives; Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; Walter McBean Galleries; Mullherein + Pollard; and Harvard Film Archives.

Tamy Ben-Tor: (Jerusalem 1975) is an artist working in video and performance living in Brooklyn, NY. She is a graduate of The School of Visual Theatre, Jerusalem in 2001, and the M.F.A. program in Visual Art at Columbia University 2006. She has had solo shows at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; Kunsthalle Winterthur; and Cubitt, London. Ben-Tor has also participated in exhibitions at ZKM, Karlsruhe; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Biennale of Sydney; Manifesta 7; Mori Museum, Tokyo; MoCA, Los Angeles; Reina Sofia, Madrid; as well as the PERFORMA 05 and PERFORMA 07 Biennials, New York. She has been collaborating with artist Miki Carmi since their joint Artists’ book “Disembodied Archetypes” Regency Arts Press , 2008.

Emily Clayton (Savannah, Tennessee 1982) is an artist working in text, painting and film based in Brooklyn, New York. She studied at New York University where she received an MFA in 2015. Her work has been exhibited at the Grand Pacific Hotel, NY; Kate Werble, NY; Susan Inglett, NY; Launch F18, NY, 80WSE, NY; and Roots and Culture, Chicago. In 2018 she published her book of drawings, How to Write an Erotic Novel, with A6 Books in London. 

Keren Cytter (Tel Aviv 1977) is an Israeli visual artist and writer living in New York. She creates particularly, films and video suites that adopt a nonlinear narrative to represent social realities. In addition to her video and performance work, Cytter is also a critically acclaimed writer: she published five novels. Selected solo exhibitions of Cytter’s work include Center of Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv and Museion, Bolzano (2019); SCHLOSS, Oslo (2017); Künstlerhaus Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2015), Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2014); Tate Modern Oil Tanks, London (2012), Avalanche, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2011).