Cynthia Madansky
b. 1961, Santa Monica, California, USA
Lives and works in Brooklyn.

For thirty years I have been making drawings, paintings, 16mm films and videos. My films integrate hybrid forms and traditions including autobiography, experimental tropes, cinema verité, scripted narrative, ethnographic observation and dance and performance, engaging with cultural and political themes, such as identity, nationalism, the transgression of borders, displacement, nuclear arms and war, foregrounding the human experience and personal testimony. I am interested in portraying the consequences of politics on the daily lives of individuals, focusing on issues of US foreign intervention while interrogating the concept of personal responsibility and national accountability.

My drawings and paintings are abstract, each series delineating the evolution of ideas, explorations and obsessions. Some work interrogates personal and political themes — shame, torture, the body, other work is diaristic, a type of automatic writing, repetitious markings of a subliminal landscape, notations that I have accumulated, layered and reworked on to surfaces of paper and masonite. For the past seven years my paintings and drawings are essentially explorations of the circle probing the relationship between form, color and psychological states.

I have begun to integrate my drawing and film practice by intervening directly on celluloid, creating a series of new work which experiments with optical printing, hand processing and painting.

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Note: All film descriptions written by Jesse Cumming, unless otherwise noted. Jesse Cumming is a curator, writer, and researcher. Cumming is Associate Curator for the Wavelengths section at Toronto International Film Festival, having previously served as the section’s Programming Associate. He has served as a programmer with Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, and as a consultant with the Berlinale Forum and Open City Documentary Festival. Independently, he has curated, co-curated, and presented programmes with the Museum of Modern Art, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Tallinn Photomonth Biennial, Anthology Film Archives, the ICA London, and more.