Throughout the month, MOCA’s SCREEN program for experimental film and video art will highlight the work of Deborah Stratman. Deborah Stratman is a Chicago-based artist and filmmaker whose practice exists between experimental and documentary genres. Over the course of the month, moca.org/screen will present two films: Optimism (2018) and The Illinois Parables (2016). Shot on location in the Yukon Territory and the state of Illinois respectively, the two films dwell in the particularities of place. These two films employ textual, archival, and aural techniques to trace latent narratives that flow below a region's surface. They interrogate historical accounts while simultaneously mapping constellations around settler-colonial intervention, ecology, and collective belief.

Optimism (2018) 
14:43min, Super 8 to HD

Draw down the sun. Dig up the gold.

The urge to relieve a winter valley of permanent shadow and find fortune in alluvial gravel are part of a long history of desire and extraction in the far Canadian north. Cancan dancers, curlers, ore smelters, former city officials and a curious cliff-side luminous disc congregate to form a town portrait. Shot in location in the Yukon Territory.

About the Artist:
Artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman makes work that investigates issues of power, control and belief, exploring how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. Recent projects have addressed freedom, surveillance, sisterhood, public speech, sinkholes, levitation, orthoptera, raptors, comets, evolution, exodus and faith. She exhibits internationally at venues including MoMA NY, Centre Pompidou, Hammer Museum, Witte de With, Tabakalera, Austrian Film Museum, Whitney Biennial and festivals including Sundance, Berlinale, CPH/DOX, Viennale, Oberhausen, True/False, Locarno and Rotterdam. Stratman lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois.

SCREEN: Deborah Stratman is organized by Troyese Robinson.