A Time and Space Machine: Abigail Severance & Lori Goldston @ ATA
Shot entirely in public spaces, Abigail Severance’s recent work plumbs the politics and promises of witnessing through a lens, tenderly wrestling with our apocalyptic anxieties. From trains and elevators to tourist traps and quiet nightscapes, she explores how entropy and surrender might stir radical imagination. In imagining what comes after the anthropocene, what could it mean to consciously surrender human authorship of the global landscape? What promise do the wild, rewilding, and wilderness hold for uncertain futures?
With live accompaniment by cellist Lori Goldston, the program begins with Public Square (2026), a collection of moving images that propose a “documentary choreography” to feel how time passes as people occupy, resist or claim public space. The second part of the program includes two of Severance’s recent train films (You Recall the Night Train & You Are A Time Machine, both 2025). In an experiment toward possible world-makings and un-makings, we find a train is both soothing and sinister, both body and apparatus, a rocking, syncopated animal, a time and space machine.
Door 7, program 7:30, approximate duration 60 min.
Abigail Severance
A Los Angeles-based artist, Abigail Severance makes films and other images about nostalgia, flawed history, and queer thought. Her films exist between documentary, fiction, and abstraction, using moving image as a meditative practice for contemplation.
Abigail’s films have shown at Sundance, The Broad Museum (L.A.), Studio Museum Harlem, HBO, MIX LGBT Festival, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, among other venues. Her work was included in the 2018 Pacific Standard Time Festival: Live Art LA/LA and her first short “Pump” (1999) was featured in the New Queer Cinema retrospective at the 60th Ann Arbor Film Festival. Abigail has received a Fulbright, a Film Independent fellowship, and a CalArts Research & Practice Grant for “We the Devoted,” a near-future narrative about borders and labor made collectively with its ensemble cast.
She is currently at work on a video & photo series “You, An Archive,” which draws together radical queer imaginaries and the intelligence of natural systems (forests, glaciers, oceans). She has been faculty at the CalArts School of Film/Video since 2009 where she also served as Dean 2019-2024.
Lori Goldston
Classically trained and rigorously de-trained, possessor of a restless, semi-feral spirit, Lori Goldston is a cellist, composer, improvisor, producer, writer and teacher from Seattle. Her voice as a cellist, amplified or acoustic, is full, textured, committed and original. A relentless inquirer, her work drifts freely across borders that separate genre, discipline, time and geography.
Current and former collaborators and/or bosses include Earth, Nirvana, Mirah, Jessika Kenney, Ilan Volkov, Eyvind Kang, Stuart Dempster, David Byrne, Terry Riley, Jherek Bischoff, Malcom Goldstein, Steve Von Till, Lonnie Holley, Cat Power, Ellen Fullman, Maya Dunietz, Mik Quantius, Embryo, O Paon, Tara Jane O’Neil, Natacha Atlas, Broken Water, Ed Pias, Christian Rizzo and Sophie Laly, Threnody Ensemble, Cynthia Hopkins, 33 Fainting Spells, Vanessa Renwick, Mark Mitchell, Lynn Shelton, and many more.
Her work has been commissioned by and/or performed at the Kennedy Center, Sydney Festival, Cineteca Nacional de México, Tectonics Festival, Frye Art Museum, Time Based Art Festival (TBA), WNYC, The New Foundation, Paris Fashion Week, Northwest Film Forum, On the Boards, Seattle International Film Festival, Seattle Jewish Film Festival, Bumbershoot, Crossing Border Festival, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Joe’s Pub, the Stone, University of Chicago, and venues large and small throughout North America, Mexico, Australia, and Europe.