A screening and discussion of Untitled (Just Kidding), a program of video works by Jesse Malmed included in Ground Floor and presented in partnership with the University of Chicago, Film Studies Center.

The works selected by Malmed for this event play in creative reading, studied density, the one-(hundred)-liner, choirs, screen texts, the bootleg, the cover, jokes, speculative etymologies, accents, loops, the cinemagic, body swaps, poetry, citation and human voice. Conceptually engaged, language-intensive and visually mesmerizing, the suite scrambles somewhere in the intersects of conceptual comedy, dizzying illogics, the poetic plu-future and sustainable sourcing. Through deliberate mistranslation and strategic denaturing of languages and codes, Jesse revels in and revealing their extra-communicative potential as sound, as image, as object, and shift audiences’concepts of the show, of the cinema.

Jesse Malmed is a Chicago-based artist and curator working in video, performance, text, occasional objects and their gaps and overlaps. He has performed, screened and exhibited at museums, microcinemas, film festivals, galleries, bars and barns. In addition to his creative work, Jesse programs at the Nightingale Cinema, co-directs the mobile exhibition space Trunk Show and has programmed work in a wide variety of contexts individually, as a member of Cinema Project and as the peripatetic Deep Leap Microcinema. A native of Santa Fe, Jesse earned his BA at Bard College and his MFA at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was named a “2014 Breakout Artist” by Newcity and is a 2014-2015 Artistic Associate at Links Hall.

This event is free, open to the public and held in conjunction with the current exhibition Ground Floor.