Virtual Screening and Conversation: Elise Rasmussen, The Year Without a Summer

Thursday, November 19, 2020, 6pm PST/9pm EST
Recording available soon

Join us online for a screening of Elise Rasmussen’s newest film A Year Without a Summer. Followed by a conversation with writer and curator Wendy Vogel.

The Year Without a Summer takes its title from a phenomenon that occurred in the summer of 1816 wherein many parts of the world experienced extreme weather conditions. Dramatic storms and colorful skies gave inspiration to Romantic art, as witnessed in works by J.M.W. Turner and Casper Friedrich; while poor harvests, economic decline and civil unrest influenced Mary Shelley’s writing of Frankenstein during her summer sojourn to Lake Geneva. A century and a half later it was discovered that the eruption of Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia was the cause of this erratic shift in the world’s weather patterns, causing a famine in Switzerland and speculation that the world was ending. Using this historical framework as a provocation, The Year Without a Summer re-examines the effects of this environmental anomaly, finding parallels with our current climate crises, while intertwining diaristic accounts of Mary Shelley and her circle, Sumbawan folklore, and Rasmussen’s own reflections traveling to the same volcano and lake during the hottest summer on record.

Elise Rasmussen is a research-based artist working with lens-based media. She has exhibited, performed and screened her work internationally including venues such as the Brooklyn Museum, the Bronx Museum, Pioneer Works (New York), Night Gallery (Los Angeles), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Belvedere 21 (Vienna), Sharjah Art Foundation (UAE), Dazibao (Montreal), and the Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto (Scarborough). Elise received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has been an artist in residence at a number of institutions including the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), the Nirox Foundation (South Africa), La Becque (Switzerland), LMCC (New York), Shandaken Projects (Storm King), SOMA (Mexico City), the Banff Centre (Alberta) and was a 2016 Fellow in the Art & Law Program (New York). Elise has been written about in publications such as Art in America, BOMB Magazine, Hyperallergic, Canadian Art and the New Inquiry, and has received grants and awards from the Jerome Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, NYFA/NYSCA, Contact Photography Festival, and the American Austrian Foundation. Born in Edmonton, Elise lives in Brooklyn, NY and Los Angeles, CA. Her work is also included in the 2020 Biennial of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Alberta.

Wendy Vogel is a writer, critic and independent curator. A former editor at Flash Art International, Modern Painters and Art in America, she writes regularly about art and culture for a number of publications, including Artforum, art-agenda and MOUSSE. Vogel has curated or co-curated exhibitions at the Hessel Museum at Bard College, The Kitchen, Abrons Art Center, VOLTA NY, bitforms and EFA Project Space. She currently teaches in the photography department at Parsons School of Design. Vogel is a 2018 recipient of a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in Short-Form Writing.