Chris Emile and Jackson Kroopf present MEND, a meditative short film that traces performances of masculinity through interview, cinema, and contemporary dance. What are the locations and sounds that inform a boy’s perspective on being a man? What performances of maleness does one observe, internalize, and translate into versions of a male self? What conflicts arise between personal intuition and socially enforced norms? In the process of exploring the questions, the dancer internalizes the voices of real boys and men as his own memories, and reclaims each space with his movement.

For this event, Chris Emile and Jackson Kroopf have designed an interactive performance prologue to accompany the film. The performance and screening will be followed by a conversation with Chris Emile and Jackson Kroopf, moderated by Jheanelle Brown.

Chris Emile is a choreographer, performer, and director based in Los Angeles. He received his formal education from the Alvin Ailey School and the Alonzo King LINES Ballet/Dominican University joint program receiving his BFA in dance. He is the co-founder/curator for movement based collective No)one. Art House which has programmed site specific performances, educational workshops, and installations for the last 5 years throughout Los Angeles. His work has been presented by Hauser & Wirth, the Getty Museum, MOCA Los Angeles, and the California African American Museum among others. Commercially and otherwise, Chris’s choreographic work has been commissioned by LA Opera in Ellen Reid’s Pulitzer Prize winning opera ‘prism’, SF Symphony, Solange Knowles, Anderson Paak, and Refinery 29. He has been a guest lecturer at the California Institute of the Arts, UCLA, AMDA, and Loyola Marymount University.

Jackson Kroopf is a filmmaker and educator from Los Angeles. He works in both fiction and non-fiction, but usually somewhere in between, collaboratively centering the perspective and creativity of the people in front of the camera. His short films have screened at the Clermont Ferrand International Short Film Festival, Frameline Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival and been broadcast on PBS. Jackson received his BA in Imagined Alternatives from Vassar College and an MFA from University of California, Santa Cruz in Social Documentation. Recently he has made content for GoldLink, Vassar College, The Mellon Foundation, Sandwich Video, Leafly, Stitch Fix, SendGrid, NBC/Oxygen, Peace Works Travel and the Righteous Conversations Project. He currently teaches film production at Vassar College.

Jheanelle Brown is a film curator/programmer and educator based in Los Angeles whose curatorial practice creates frameworks to explore the boundlessness of Black life in experimental and non-fiction film and video. She is interested in the space between fugitivity and futurity and elevating an ethic of care. Jheanelle is a board member and an associate programmer for Los Angeles Filmforum and recently served as guest co-curator, with Darol Olu Kae, for Black Radical Imagination. Jheanelle was co-curator, with Sarah Loyer, of Time Is Running Out of Time: Experimental Film and Video from the L.A. Rebellion and Today on view at Art + Practice. She is currently Special Faculty at California Institute of the Arts and will be Distinguished Visiting Artist at Otis College of Art and Design next semester.

MEND: Screening, conversation, and performance with Chris Emile and Jackson Kroopf, moderated by Jheanelle Brown is presented in conjunction with No Wrong Holes: Thirty Years of Nayland Blake, on view from September 29, 2019 to January 26, 2020, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

The exhibition and related programs are made possible thanks to lead support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Generous support is provided by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Marieluise Hessel, Linda Janger, Matthew Marks Gallery, and Friends of Nayland Blake.

ICA LA is supported by its Curator’s Council, Fieldwork, and 1717 Collective.