This Labor Day weekend, the Center for Experimental Lectures returns to Shandaken for a third annual evening of lecture-performances, cooking, and camping, featuring new lecture-performances by Lizzie Feidelson and Katherine Hubbard, as well as a selection of new video work by Chloé Rossetti, made while in residence this year, presented by the Shandaken Project.

Lizzie Feidelson will present an untitled lecture on the social media presence of Bridgette MacFadden, a real woman from Boston, Massachusetts. We will mostly explore the complicity of watching, but also the uses and abuses of public information, and the act of performing oneself.

Hubbard’s presentation is tentatively titled Notes from Utah. Notes on gray. It will consider the relationship that photography creates between the human eye and the camera eye; film as a registration of light; grayscale as a range of tone and value; tone and value as markers of point of view. Engaging the audience with real-time, in-person examples of these lines of thinking throughout the lecture, Hubbard will mark the boundaries of vision human and camera present within the lecture space.

Just before the lectures, as the sun is setting, the Shandaken Project will present a selection of new work by Chloé Rossetti, from a cycle of videos called Karan Divine Retreats, made while in residence at Shandaken earlier this summer. Utilizing dark humor and outsized characters in the tradition of George Kuchar, Alex Bag, or Mike Smith, Rossetti’s confessional-style vignettes follow the intellectual and moral development of a young art star coming to terms with her aesthetic, loft-centric self-presentation as it crumbles against the backdrop of “wild” nature. Rossetti unpacks complex ideas of identity and performance while poking gentle fun at some contradictions and eccentricities familiar to urban cultural producers and their idols.

Breakfast on Sunday, August 31 will be provided by Shandaken Project member Elissa Goldstone. She continues the tradition of providing meals for events at the project that was begun by prior resident Chloé Rossetti, mentioned above. She began this tradition by reflecting on the spirit of meal sponsorship at Dergah al-Farah, where she is a dervish in the Nur Ashki Jerrahi Sufi Order. This dergah provides around 20 iftars [meals] every Ramadan, each for up to 50 people. The dervishes take turns sponsoring these meals for the whole community. This reduces the burden on the dergah, and allows everyone to eat for free at each event. It was Rossetti's hope that the residents, guests, and supporters of the Shandaken Project would follow suit—and Goldstone generously picked up the torch. Her donation will support a breakfast for campers, catered by the project.

Visitors to the Shandaken Project should BYO drinks, barbecue contributions for Saturday night’s dinner, and camping/tent supplies.