In her first major solo museum exhibition, Brooklyn-based artist Jenny Perlin examines details of everyday life through 16mm film, video, and drawing. Included in the exhibition is the multi-channel video installation "Sight Reading", which documents three pianists performing a difficult piece of music for the first time. In addition, the exhibition presents the 16mm film loop "Washing", which poignantly describes the changed skyline of Lower Manhattan after September 11, 2001, and represents an attempt to clean a landscape and a collective memory of trauma.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 9
Jenny Perlin Film Screening
8 p.m. in the Louise C. Murdock Theatre at 20th Century Club, 536 North Broadway, Wichita
Free for students and WSU faculty (with ID)
$3 general public

In conjunction with the exhibition Possible Models: New Work by Jenny Perlin, the Ulrich Museum of Art will host a screening of three documentary films by Perlin not included in the exhibition. The artist will introduce and make brief remarks about the films: Happy are the Happy (Your Best Joke, Please!), Perseverance & How to Develop It, and View from Elsewhere. A question and answer period will immediately follow. Running time: 52 minutes.

Happy are the Happy (Your Best Joke, Please!)
16mm, b/w, sound, 18 minutes, 1999 (co-directed w/ Sarah Jane Lapp)
Happy are the Happy traces a journey into humor, guided by the survivors of not-so-funny lives. How does one generation of survivors communicate with the next? Can humor function as a shared language for disparate communities of displaced people-specifically, a difficult diaspora of Bosnian, Jewish, and Romany refugees? And could you tell us your best joke, please? Of its participants and its viewers, this experimental, non-fiction film asks these questions and others relating to the matrix of memory, survival, and comic impulse of everyday life-in Prague and beyond.

Perseverance & How to Develop It
16mm, b/w + color, sound, 14 minutes, 2003
Perseverance & How to Develop It takes the viewer on a journey through obsession, the drive for success, 1915 self-help tricks, and strikes at the Ford Motor Company. The film explores how the growth of industry in the 20th century relied on self-help to instill a drive for success in young workers. Perseverance & How to Develop It was a book published in 1915. Its concluding chapter, "Practical Exercises," outlined five tasks to be practiced on a daily basis. Untangling yarn, counting grains of rice, measuring oneself against a watch--these tasks made for success, by disciplining the mind and body. These exercises bear a striking resemblance to movements along an assembly line. "Perseverance's" publication came at the same time as the perfection of the Ford Motor Company assembly line. In the same period, Sigmund Freud wrote "On Mourning and Melancholia," describing a phenomenon which we now call depression. The appearance of these texts--at the height of American industrialization and World War I--was not a coincidence. To become a productive member of society, whether working in the city or preparing for war, a young man needed to manage his moods and develop self-control. The same issues come into play today. Workaholism, the widespread use of psycho-pharmaceutical drugs, self-help books, and an insatiable quest for happiness all resonate with Perseverance, written nearly 100 years ago. The cycle of work, success, depression, and back to work, continues to this very day.

View from Elsewhere
16mm/DV, color, sound, 22 minutes, 2002
What kind of violence is exile? There is the exile by choice, and the one who is forced from home. There is the refugee who later becomes an exile. There is the visitor whose country dissolves in his wake. There are families and individuals, separated by space, by politics, by history. An exile lives a double life, here and not-here. Who speaks in this film? Teachers, workers, students, parents, long-term residents, asylum-seekers, people with families and with friends. Songs from Kosovo resound loudly in a Geneva community center; a call from Sierra Leone transforms a refugee center classroom; landscapes blur into daydreams of home— these images contrast with the difficult issues of discrimination, incessant bureaucracy, and threats of deportation. Migration, intolerance, and violence have been seen as inevitable consequences of global culture. View from Elsewhere reminds us that border closings, forced deportations, and travel restrictions have real, tangible effects on peoples' lives.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 10
Opening of Possible Models: New Work by Jenny Perlin
4 p.m. illustrated talk by the artist in 210 McKnight Art Center West (School of Art & Design) at Wichita State University, 1845 Fairmount Street
5 to 7 p.m. opening reception at the museum with brief remarks by the artist at 6 p.m.
Free and open to the public

For more information about these events, call the Ulrich Museum at (316) 978-3664, e-mail ulrich@wichita.edu or visit www.ulrich.wichita.edu.