Diane and I first met in the summer of 2002 when she was Squeaky Wheel's resident artist and I had just moved to town. We got initiated to the cty together. Once Diane's month long residency ended and she'd left, Buffalo felt an entirely different place to me. I'd associated Diane with Buffalo and couldn't fathom that she actually lived somewhere else, wasn't a regular, and wouldn't be living across the street from me at The Lenox Hotel anymore. I'm extremely proud to host Diane and show her beautiful films in the new Hallwalls cinema, a place that didn't exist last time she was here, a new corner of our mutual city that I can introduce her to. As Diane is Hallwalls first visiting media artist, this evening's program is both a celebration of her art and of all new beginnings. — Joanna Raczynska

Diane Bonder has been making lo-fi experimental film and video for 10 years. Her work has been screened at the Whitney Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Anthology Film Archive, San Francisco Cinematheque, and at festivals internationally. Shooting super-8 and 16mm in documentary, poetic and semi-narrative styles, she explores autobiographical content, addressing issues of identity, sexuality, addiction, memory, and loss. Diane lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Program running time: 73 minutes

(16mm, 13 min., 1996)
Dear Mom is a story about the formation of a girl's identity in relation to her powerful mother, her matriarchal family, and domestic fantasies created by film melodramas of the 40s and 50s. When the young girl's fantasy of matricide comes true due to the untimely death of her mother, she finds herself at a crossroads. She is left to reconstruct her own identity and finds out that her mother is more complex than she imagines.

(16mm, 12 min., 2000)
If is a story of longing and loss, taking place within the confines of a room whose objects represent the emotional perceptions of space, and the missing lovers presence. The reality of the outside world encroaches on the inner-space of daydreaming.

(16mm, 15 min., 2001)
If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home By Now is about the divisiveness over land, the relationship of public and private space in small town America, and the concept of home. Using documentary strategies, landscape stills are juxtaposed to stories "ripped from the headlines" of a small-town newspaper. The struggle over public space described in the stories, reflect universal concepts of space, privacy and property ownership everywhere.

(16mm, 15 min., 2003)
Urban ghosts collide, abandoned umbrellas tumble down the streets, my father calls again and again to say good-bye. A film about loss, longing and changing weather. Closer to Heaven is a good-bye poem and homage to my father.

(super-8 on video, 10 min., 2005)
Created for the Kodak-sponsored, Against the Grain Invitational at Squeaky Wheel in 2005, You Are Not From Here is a record of a rapidly disappearing vernacular landscape. With an oblique narration about the process of gentrification, the film explores the notions of discovery, belonging, and the meaning we project on our environment.

(16mm, 2006, 8 min.)
Everyday movement weaves into a dance of memory and loss. A study of formal opposites in motion, constantly coming together and pulling apart.

Some publications related to this event:
January, 2006 - 2006