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ART LIKE LOVE! (ALL!)

ART LIKE LOVE! (ALL!) is a video-art project created by Pioneers Go East Collective, an award-winning Radical Queer performance and video art group in residence at La MaMa, Judson Church, and a partner with The LGBT Center. ALL! is a meditation on age, queerness, and the struggle of making art.
Inspired by radical avant-garde film-maker Tom Rubnitz, the project borrows DIY and camp aesthetics to celebrate otherness. This investigation triggers the questions: Where is the 'us' inside our art? When and how do we make work that is honest about us? Are we presenting ourselves or being represented in our work? With the bold affirmation that "Art doesn't have to be consumed," the film sets an optimistic tone, allowing us to reflect on the creative process and artistic intervention. The intention is to positively redefine ourselves and our creative trajectories, something tough to grasp in the highly competitive art world.

Hoovering between dystopian and utopian reality, downtown icon performance artist and Stonewall Witness Agosto Machado and other artists from the collective are entrapped in this makeshift world. Agosto guides them on a journey of self-discovery in all their infinite wisdom, which will ultimately result in their creative transformation.

The Queer icon Agosto Machado has been a fixture of the downtown scene starting in the 1970s and is best known for his work his association with Jack Smith, Mario Montez, Jackie Curtis, John Vaccaro, Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling. Agosto sheds light on the creative process then and now, highlighting our struggles to fulfill our passions and what moves us and inspires us, both aesthetically and intellectually, individually and collectively.

  • Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte
    Director
  • Kathleen Kelley
    Director
    Territory
  • Agosto Machado
    Writer
  • Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte
    Writer
  • Philip Treviño
    Producer
  • Agosto Machado
    Key Cast
  • Daniel Diaz
    Key Cast
  • Bree Breeden
    Key Cast
  • Beth Graczyk
    Key Cast
  • Project Type:
    Experimental
  • Runtime:
    8 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    May 3, 2021
  • Production Budget:
    7,400 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Screening: The LGBT Center
    New York City
    United States
    May 6, 2021
  • Chez Bushwick

    United States
    June 14, 2021
Director Biography - Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte, Kathleen Kelley

Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte (writer, creative director, and filmmaker) is a NYSCA Individual Artist recipient (2019), recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts awards (2019-2021), and a finalist for the Jerome Foundation's 2019–20 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship. He is an immigrant gay artist and a NYC-based writer, director, and video-maker dedicated to performance and installations that reflect queer perspectives and vulnerability. He founded Pioneers Go East Collective in 2010, a company-in-residence at La MaMa and Judson Church. Lo Forte’s projects have been presented in NYC at La MaMa, Dixon Place, Galapagos, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, The Exponential Festival, JACK, The Incubator Arts Project/Ontological Hysterical, Chez Bushwick, HERE, Governors Island/LMCC, and Art on Air–Clock Tower Gallery. He has collaborated with The Foundry, Great Jones Repertory, Parijat Desai, and Ellen Stewart. He designed at the Venice Biennale and has toured in Europe. Awards include LMCC grants (2011–19); New Vic Artist Associate (2015); Process Space Residency—LMCC (2014), and an Opera America Director Award (2010). He has an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Kathleen Kelley (filmmaker/ editor) is a new media artist and Associate Professor of Dance and Technology at Montclair State University. Recent video and new media project created as a film-maker, cinematographer and editor include collaborations with Janessa Clark on Future Becomes Past – dance film (2018) which was Official Selection at 20 International Film Festivals, and in the US at Plaxall Gallery – LIC Arts (NYC), Utah Dance Film Festival, Phoenix Dance Film Festival, Oklahoma Dance Film Festival, Divulge Film Fest (LA), RAD Fest (Kalamazoo, MI); Territory – dance/poetry hybrid film (2018) that was published in TriQuarterly Literary Magazine, and presented in the panel "Kinetic Pages in the U.S. and Iceland at NonfictioNow Conference, Reykjavik, Iceland, and Now Conference hosted by the Taft Research Center at the University of Cincinnati, to name a few; video performance installation Digitized Figures created in collaboration with poet Sarah Nordgren was featured in the Philly FringeArts Digital Fringe Festival, and the Rutgers University Momentum Technology Videos Festival, and the Dance Complex in Boston, MA.

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Director Statement

Starting in 2015, Pioneers Go East Collective has developed a cycle of multimedia works that includes interdisciplinary performance, video-art and video interviews, shaped around personal narratives that incorporate spoken-text and movement-based practice to explore first-hand descriptions of events. Both imaginative and rigorous - our devised process allows us to be on the field as fully engaged artists by means of documenting true stories using different media – video footage & audio interviews – combined with popular culture.

Through personal storytelling that blends heartfelt, yet humorous experiences infused with joy and high-energy, the collective celebrates gender non-binary as a form of social activism, and as a protest against the artificial confinements of gender roles, and to attempt to examine those structures – including homophobia and sexism. The impetus beyond the work is celebrating pride and generating a more meaningful direction regarding LGBTQ advancements towards inclusivity.