VISUAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES

Upcoming screenings and shows

2011 CPH:DOX, New Visions Competition

2011 Antimatter Film Festival

2011 Eye Am: Another Experiment by Women Film Festival at Anthology Film Archives

Bio

Jessica Bardsley is an artist and writer whose moving-image work has been presented by the MCA Detroit in conjunction with the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Dia Art Foundation, Kassel Dokfest, Antimatter Film Festival, Images Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Rooftop Films and more. Her newest film will premiere are CPH:DOX in their New Visions Compeition. She was awarded a 2010 Princess Grace Award in Film and completed her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is currently completing her MA in Visual and Critical Studies. She is an instructor in the English Department at SAIC and the Program Assistant for Conversations at the Edge.

Research and Practice Interests

Generally, my work centers around experiemtal non-fiction practices across the genres of documentary, archival art, and essayistic writing.

My most recent projects center around archival art practices, and relating certain strands of these practices to affect theory through a notion of "critical nostalgia." Nostalgic longing is here the impetus for fictional, critical and/or utopic reconstructions of the past.

Previous critical projects have drawn from cultural anthropology and documentary studies to articulate a conception of "evocative" non-fiction, which resists realist, authenticating modes of representing the past. Instead, evocative techniques embrace the gaps and cracks in archives and historical materials to evoke an impression of the past.

My creative work similarly draws on archival and documentary approaches to unearth the poetics and politics of various places. I am often interested in how the colonial dreams of conquering the natural environment have now manifested, with repurcussions we have only begun to understand. Most of my recent work centers around the Florida Everglades and its historical, colonial, and affective topographies.

For more information please visit: www.jessicabardsley.com