Open Air Media Festival is an outdoor media arts program hosted at PS1 in Iowa City. Our annual festival invites the public to experience video, performance, installation, sound, and other media arts in communal, accessible locations.
2023 Festival:
Saturday June 3rd 8:30-11:00PM
at PS1 Close 538 S. Gilbert
Participating Artists: Installations and Performances (Iowa-based)
Auden Lincoln-Vogel, Emily Berkheimer, Devlin Caldwell, Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder, Johanna Winters and Sarah Minor, Daniel Fine and Dana Keeton, M Denney, Stephanie Miracle, Jeremy Chen, Ellen Oliver, Dorian Dean, Johanna Kasimow, Jacob Smithburg
Participating Artists: Film/Video Screening (Midwest/Prairie Region)
Oona Taper, Sonnie Wooden, Serena JV Elston, Rudolf Lingens, Ernest Strauhal, Rafaella Las, Jordy Brazo, Lya Finston, Katina Bitsicas, Jason Bernagozzi, Ellen Mueller, Lorelei d'Andriole, Caleb Mehl, London Huser, Sara Eliot Steuer, Jonathan Johnson, Laura Farahzad Mayer, Toby Kaufmann-Buhler, Jenelle Stafford
The 2023 Open Air Media Festival is generously supported by • Iowa Arts Council, a division of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs • City of Iowa City Public Art Program • Veridian Credit Union
Johanna Winters and Sarah Minor, Hag Cycle is a collaborative performance that uses shadow theater to engage a contemporary audience. The performers, Johanna Winters and Sarah Minor, are artists working across disciplines who are interested in using analog technologies to think about how image, text, and sound work in tandem, live. This performance will extend the traditional methods of shadow theater by utilizing vintage overhead projectors and two 6 x 6’ scrims. The audience will be seated outside of the screens, while the projected silhouetted imagery is animated from within. A live score, performed by composer, Ramin Roshandel, and a sequence of dialogue recited by the performers, will provide the soundscape. These three layers – image, text and sound – will prompt the audience to consider themes of isolation, invisibility, ugliness, and the history of “ululation,” a vocalization of grief once considered too offensive to be heard within a city’s walls, suitable only for wilderness.
Johanna Winters is an artist, educator, and puppeteer currently based in Iowa City. Her work engages printmaking, puppetry, video, performance, and sculpture to consider the condition of a puppet-protagonist who performs her sensuality for the camera. Winter’s work has been exhibited and performed nationally – recently at the H & R Block Artspace (Kansas City, MO), Charlotte Street, (Kansas City, MO). Drama Club (Chicago, IL), and Coop Gallery (Nashville, TN). She is a 2022 recipient of the Charlotte Street Foundation Visual Artist Award, and is the current Grant Wood Fellow in Printmaking at the University of Iowa School of Art & Art History.
Sarah Minor is an interdisciplinary artist and the author of three books including Slim Confessions, winner of the 2021 Noemi Press Prize, Bright Archive (Rescue Press 2020), winner of the Big Other Nonfiction Book Award, and The Persistence of the Bonyleg, a chapbook from Essay Press. Minor is the recipient of the Barthelme Prize for Short Prose, an Individual Research Grant from the American-Scandinavian Foundation and an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. Her work has been collected in places like Best American Experimental Writing, Advanced Creative Nonfiction, and A Harp in the Stars.
Learn more about the Media Festival by visiting the PS1 event page.