How do artists overcome the hurdles of moving to New York City? In this film, artist Alejandro Almanza Pereda contends with a series of obstacles while enrolled in his first semester of graduate school at Hunter College in Manhattan. A Mexican citizen, Almanza Pereda’s first difficulty is finding a way to live and work as an artist in New York City. He decides his best way to get a visa, and join an art community, is to go back to school. Without enough money for rent, he relies on a network of friends and fellow artists, couch surfing for four months in exchange for favors and throwing parties. While settling into his MFA studio and preparing for his first graduate critique, tragedy strikes when he accidentally destroys a series of sculptures built with fluorescent bulbs. Ever-resourceful, Almanza Pereda exhibits what survived and then dismantles the sculptures, returning what he can for a little extra cash. The final hurdle in the film is school itself: Almanza Pereda learns that Hunter College plans to demolish the current studio facility—a gritty building with grand underutilized spaces near Port Authority. He hangs an artwork, in protest, on the facade of the building to express both his frustration with the school’s administration and his solidarity with fellow graduate students. Says the artist, “When you have a harsh path, you improvise, you learn, no?” Featuring music from Alejandro Almanza Pereda’s band Bachelor Sound Machín, and the artworks This placed Displaced Misplaced (2012), After all these years I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her (2012), Spare the rod and spoil the child (2008-12), Change the world or go home (2009), Just give me a place to stand (2007),Andamio (2007), and Untitled (Ropero) (2006).

Alejandro Almanza Pereda (b. 1977, Mexico City, Mexico) lives and works in Brooklyn and Manhattan, New York.

How does an artist transform her source material? At her Greenpoint, Brooklyn studio, artist Erin Shirreff discusses the creation of her recent video work, Lake (2012). Working from a photograph of Lake Okanagan (the area she grew up in British Columbia, Canada) that she found in an early 1980′s tourist magazine, Shirreff builds Lake from a single found image. Shirreff’s process is an unexpected mixture of digital and analog technique: in Photoshop, she creates a series of color variations based on the original source picture but then re-photographs those variations—using intentionally distorting lighting techniques—to create thousands of “secondary” images. Bringing those secondary images into her editing software, Shirreff constructs a seamless video sequence, creating the effect of an uncannily shifting landscape in a slow but constant state of visual change. Editing the video presents a subtle aesthetic challenge. Shirreff strives to find the right balance between the artifice of naturalistic, weather-like effects and the illusion-breaking reality of the original photographic surfaces. In previous video works like Roden Crater (2009) and UN 2010 (2010), Shirreff reveals her on-going psychological fascination with singular forms situated in a deep landscape. The slow play of light and color over images of the Roden Crater and UN building serve to throw those forms’ fundamental stillness and apartness into relief. At the Hauser & Wirth gallery in Manhattan, Lake is projected on a freestanding wall, yet another transformation of the original source image, from two-dimensional photograph to time-based sculptural object.

Erin Shirreff (b. 1975, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.