Light Work’s Urban Video Project is pleased to present an indoor screening of award-winning filmmaker Jennifer Reeder’s latest feature film, Knives and Skin on Thursday, November 7 in Watson Theater at Light Work!

Reeder will join us after the screening for a Q&A. Reception follows.

FREE & OPEN to the public.

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About the Work

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Knives and Skin

2019 | TRT: 1 hr 52 min 

Where is Carolyn Harper?

The disappearance of a young girl in a small town forces a group of teenagers and adults to confront their fears and failures. An ensemble of characters awkwardly grasp for survival strategies as they unravel under the impact of grief.

Knives and Skin follows the investigation of a young girl’s disappearance in the rural Midwest, led by an inexperienced local sheriff. Unusual coping techniques develop among the traumatized small town residents with each new secret revealed. The ripple of fear and suspicion destroys some relationships and strengthens others. The teenagers experience an accelerated loss of innocence while their parents are forced to confront adulthood failures. This mystical teen noir presents coming of age as a life long process and examines the profound impact of grief.

The main characters’ girlhood is a place of transcendence but also transgression in a movie that embraces its own style. Reeder’s teen noir draws on a rich cultural DNA of genre classics, from the surreal horror of David Lynch to high school classics like John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club and Mark Waters’ Mean Girls, giving them a decidedly feminist spin.

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About the Filmmaker

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Jennifer Reeder constructs personal fiction films about relationships, trauma, and coping. Her award-winning narratives borrow from a range of forms including after-school specials, amateur music videos, and magical realism. These films have shown around the world, including at the Sundance Film Festival, Berlinale, the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, SXSW, the Wexner Center, and in The Whitney Biennial. She is the recipient of Rockefeller and Creative Capital grants. She currently teaches in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

More info: thejenniferreeder.com

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UVP 2019-20: Wayward Bodies

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From the earliest days of video, the body has played a central role as a platform for performance and the technologically-mediated exploration of representation, identity, and the metaphysics of presence. Taking inspiration from a conversation between poet Fred Moten and writer Saidiya Hartman exploring their respective concepts of “fugitivity” and “waywardness,” UVP 2019-20: Wayward Bodies, features artists whose work frames the body as a dynamic locus of creative deviation and inventive unruliness defying structures that seek to contain and control it.