Underdonk

press release

Parallel Channels
Sat, Oct 5 – Sun, Nov. 3rd

Adam Golfer & Katy McCarthy 

Curated by Christian Hendricks
Opening reception Sat, Oct 5th from 6-8 PM 

Please Note: This show will take place at Underdonk’s new location
at 191 Henry St. in the Lower East Side 

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, unless it’s a river. Rivers possess the unique ability to elongate time and extend themselves by force. The autonomous flow of a river propels new waters through its parallel banks, but it accumulates old stories from the shores. You can try to map a route as scientifically as you want, but rivers will mystify even the best laid plans. 

Parallel Channels features two new films by Adam Golfer and Katy McCarthy. The films explore the misalignment between nature and how we occupy it, transform it and remember it.  

Golfer’s film, Magic Valley is set in present day reality, in the southernmost region of Texas, known as the Rio Grande Valley. The film moves wearily through the borderlands, often fixing its gaze on others, searching and looking. Birdwatchers congregate to silently praise local wildlife. Border patrol circle a militarized boundary where everyone is suspect. Native and migratory wildlife exist in a territory being rattled by human disputes and causations – migration, suburban sprawl, climate change – and cleaved apart by the construction of the wall that divides Texas from Mexico. 

The film weaves an ethereal space of happenings along the river: crossings, bird watchers, conservationists, wildlife, border patrol apprehensions, radio broadcasts, wall construction sites, and surveillance technologies. We overhear fragments of conversation. These vignettes reveal a border control situation that is anathema to the natural flows of people and land. The consequences are mortal. These shards of experience depict the contradictions and banality of everyday life along the Rio Grande. The land is the land no matter where the river bends.

McCarthy guides us down a different river in Neches. We join an older woman, who experiences a quiet telepathy with the river. She is our river guide, although she can’t promise us answers. The river offers us the woman’s memories, as she recalls being a young girl warmly introduced to the spirit of the river by her mother. The film conflates time, slowly assembling a puzzle that is missing a final piece. The missing piece of Neches may be a demolished chunk of land adjacent to the river, or perhaps it’s the resolution we all crave about the past. 

These films represent the latest works of two filmmakers dedicated to the excavation of time and the waters that run through its valleys. 

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Underdonk
191 Henry St.

F train to East Broadway or FMJZ to Delancey Essex
[email protected]
Hours: Open Saturdays and Sundays 1-6 PM