Join us for wine and conversation to launch Proteotypes’ new publication, Cryptozoo. In this handsome feuilleton twelve writers have undertaken to respond to twelve images from Erik Schurink’s “Cryptozoo” portfolio. With his mind on paradise, theme of a Proteus Gowanus show he was co-curating, he started to notice animals coming out of hiding as if summoned. They emerged from sidewalks, walls, and streets, from bits of industrial scrap, from wire window-grates, from rust stains and scuffings in dust, and posed briefly for his camera.

When Proteotypes editor Tom LaFarge saw them, he knew these animals wanted to inhabit a book, so they invited writers to answer one particular image, chosen for them by lot. Come to the reception to view the charming results and stay for a glass of wine or two.

A program of short films by Ernie Gehr, Stan Brakhage, Jeanne Liotta, Sam Green and Mark Street will be followed by a post-screening discussion with Gehr, Green and Street. The films, curated by Lynne Sachs, Mark Street and Erik Schurink splinter and refract our preconceptions about paradise. The line-up begins with Stan Brakhage’s 1960s elegy to the NYC subway as urban miracle and his later microscopic homage to the awesome simplicity of a leaf, a petal and an insect. Next, we focus upward for Jeanne Liotta’s celebration of all things starry in the cosmos. Ernie Gehr is next with This Side of Paradise, of which Village Voice critic J. Hoberman said, “To watch (Gehr’s) film is to journey into the underground ….When Gehr inverts his camera, the world turns up-side-down. Heaven and Earth change places. The mud above, the sky below – which side of Paradise, indeed?”

Next Sam Green will take us on a journey of 20th Century utopias – both sublime and failed. And finally we’ll follow Mark Street on a geo-poetic search for the home of NYC’s collage hero Joseph Cornell, a life-long resident of the borough of Queens’ very own Utopia Parkway.

After the films, filmmakers Ernie Gehr, Sam Green and Mark Street will join us for a discussion of their work in the context of Proteus’ year-long investigation of Paradise.

The program: The Wonder Ring by Stan Brakhage with Joseph Cornell (4 min., 1960); Mothlight by Stan Brakhage (4 min., 1963); Observando el Cielo by Jeanne Liotta (12min., 2007); Sweet Dreams by Jeanne Liotta (4 min., 2009); This Side of Paradise by Ernie Gehr (14 min. 1991); Utopia Part 3: the World’s Largest Shopping Mall by Sam Green (12 min., 2010); and Utopia Parkway by Mark Street (5 min., 2011).