Laurie McKenna

It’s 2017 in Bisbee, Arizona, an old copper-mining town just miles from the Mexican border. The town’s close-knit community prepares to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Bisbee’s darkest hour: the infamous Bisbee Deportation of 1917, during which 1,200 striking miners were violently taken from their homes, banished to the middle of the desert, and left to die. Townspeople confront this violent, misunderstood past by staging dramatic recreations of the escalating strike. These dramatized scenes are based on subjective versions of the story and “directed,” in a sense, by residents with conflicting views of the event. Deeply personal segments torn from family history build toward a massive restaging of the deportation itself on the exact day of its 100th anniversary.

A former student of Levine and collaborator and friend of Price, McKenna made this short about Nancy Luce, a desperate, creative, Martha’s Vineyard oddball of the mid 1800s. Using old photographs, puppets, toy models, and off-the-cuff footage, McKenna creates a lonely work as daring and personal as that of her teachers and peers.

A film of stuffed animals, haunted by a lullaby. Much like Price, McKenna makes visible the horror hiding beneath the surface of familiar American scene audio: rehearsal cassette recording, vocals: Laurie and Tom Rhodes (Luther), the Fabulous Turquoise Rain and Shines, 1987.

McKenna’s pandemidiario conjures desert punk powering the aggregate of memory and charcoal and grounds national rupture in a sonic package. “A whole formed by combining several (typically disparate) elements” – Laurie McKenna