Eve-Lauryn LaFountain

Thousandsuns
Cinema

Eve-Lauryn Little Shell LaFountain (Ojibwe) is an artist, educator, and an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, born in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her analogue practice is multifaceted, employing beadwork, installation, and live film performance to explore landscape, identity, family history, and Indigenous futurism from the perspective of her mixed Native American and Jewish heritage. She received a BA in Experimental Film, Photography, and Native American Studies from Hampshire College (2008) and a dual MFA in Film & Video, Photography & Media from the California Institute of the Arts (2014). Her work has been exhibited at venues around the world, including the Venice Biennale, Autry Museum, Walker Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Los Angeles Filmforum, Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, REDCAT, and Images Festival, among others. She is the recipient of numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including a Sundance New Frontier Labs Fellowship (2019), an Indigenous MacArthur Fellowship (2018), a Flaherty Fellowship (2013), an ABC Disney Film Workshop Fellowship at the Institute of American Indian Arts (2008), and grants from the Mike Kelley Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. She was a COUSIN collective Cycle I artist (2020–2021) in support of her documentary project Re/Dislocation, exploring transgenerational Ojibwe migration and the legacies of the Indian Relocation Act. She was general operations manager at Echo Park Film Center (2009–2011) and currently teaches alternative photographic processes and handmade filmmaking as a special faculty member at the California Institute of Arts. She lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

ONLINE SCREENING DATES: January 9 – January 30, 2023

FILMS IN THIS PROGRAM: Smudge Series (Indabaabasaan, Soda Lake, and Boozhoo Jiinayag), 7 min, 2013; From Sea to See, 8 min, 2015

This series is co-selected and presented with COUSIN collective and is generously funded by a Digital Now grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Smudge Series (Indabaabasaan, Soda Lake, and Boozhoo Jiinayag), 7 min, 2013

This trilogy of 16mm films explores living Indigenous histories in Southern California. The Ojibwe titles come from the artist’s traditional tribal language, which she uses in her art practice to explore, reclaim, and relearn. – MUBI

From Sea to See, 8 min, 2015

Manifest Destiny claimed that all this land, known to the original peoples as Turtle Island, was free for the taking. European settler expansion to the west was inevitable. Outer space became the final frontier after recent conquests. Now even our space fantasies are dwindling. I set out to edit these small rolls of film together as a farewell to Ektachrome, a farewell to the last of Kodak’s color reversal films. It became a meditation on the legacy of Manifest Destiny and the greed of taking what cannot belong to anyone.

A lot of what I do is starting with something simple like a photograph, then doing relatively simple techniques to expose the magic that can happen in a process. I think of magic as happenstance or accidental things that end up being really beautiful and changing the work completely, which is usually something that you can’t repeat. – Eve-Lauryn LaFountain

Visit Eve-Lauryn LaFountain’s website to learn more about her work.

Learn more about Eve-Lauryn LaFountain’s COUSIN-supported project, Re/Dislocation.

Watch an interview with Eve-Lauryn LaFountain and Fox Maxy conducted by Adam Piron at the Autry Museum of the American West.

All stills, photographs, and artwork courtesy © Eve-Lauryn LaFountain/Little Shell Studios. Screening co-presented with movimcat.