Screening: Tether

Katie Schroeder and David Burr present an intimate conversation over a slightly competitive game of tetherball. With fists, palms and force players strive for victory by successfully wrapping a ball tightly around a post, weighed by sand, or embedded deep in the earth. It is not a formally competitive game, it is child’s play. This video centers on two adults who find themselves engaged in youthful wargames and mediating personal conflicts with aggressive paddling and minor cardio exasperation around this monolithic linguistic mechanism.

David C. Burr is an artist from Massachusetts studying for his MFA in the Painting and Drawing department of University of Washington. He received his BFA from University of Massachusetts Dartmouth where he worked with faculty and the Office of Undergraduate Research to create drawings exploring the conditions of vision when confronted by the fragmentary nature of time. In 2017 he showed in a two person show with Emily Franicola in New Bedford, MA called “hypertexts” illustrating disjunction between source and authorship. Combining these interests he has begun to use film and sculpture to offer programmatic and experimental events to his audiences. Through these explorative modes of creation and collaboration David has continued to develop his interest in the effect of perceptual cognitive dysfunction on realizing the self in a growingly decentralized social ecosystem.

Katie Schroeder recently received two BFA’s from Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis, IN. Her work focuses on the roles technology plays in social intimacy and isolation, often using found and constructed objects that manifest in installation, video, and performance. Her most recent work was displayed in the Specialist Gallery’s SPEC Space (Seattle, WA) as a solo show: Menagerie. She has also exhibited in other galleries around Seattle including the Jacob Lawrence Gallery, The Alice, and at a pop up gallery in Capitol Hill. Schroeder is currently a MFA candidate in the 3D4M program at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she is broadening her understanding of online community, technology, and media consumption in hypermodernity.

This program is a result of the Henry’s invitation to artists exhibiting in the 2018 University of Washington MFA + MDes Thesis Exhibition to utilize public programming as a generative tool for expanding upon themes and concepts found within their work.