Molly Gross, June 2021
I balance both my creative work — art, poetry, curation — and my work as an Arts Management Consultant with a focus on Communications and Community building. Everything I do is through a Racial Equity lens.
Among other creative pursuits I write poetry (TheDiagram.com and Diagram.2 Art.Text.Schematic, The Second Print Anthology, 2006, ed. Ander Monson ). My six poetry chapbook The Whisperer was completed in January 2021. And I create works within a collaboration called Saint Flashlight.
I studied Media Art at the Die Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig [HGB], and lived in Germany–Berlin, Leipzig, Boehlen, Aachen–throughout the 90s. During this time I also helped manage the Thueringische Sommer Akademie for eight years. SoAk celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2016.
After moving to New York in 2000, a wonderful mixture of timing and fate lead me to work at BAM promoting its superb repertory film program BAM Film (formally BAMcinematek). Then I was the Senior Publicist for the Whitney museum, one of my favorite places in New York. At the Whitney I worked on two Biennials, including the 2012 edition which included an amazing array of films, dance performances, and music. Most recently I was the Communications Director for The Drawing Center, a gem of a museum in Soho. A highlight was conceptualizing and producing Funhouse, a two-day festival of comic arts in the spring of 2018.
I live with my husband Craig Howarth and our cat Momo in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, New York.
Room 144 
fantastic site!
all the best,
david john
YHBHS
Dear Molly,
My name is Michael Woods and I am one of the co-founders of the Disassociative Collective. We are originally from Chicago, though have expanded in New York City, and many of us are NYU Film alum where we studied experimental film under Prof. Darrell Wilson. I wanted to share my newest short with you http://vimeo.com/23025803
It will be the first of many to come – all of which are in post-production. This short, Disney World, is an avant-garde attack at the cancer of representation that erodes all reality into a void of signs substituting for existence, the social, and god via the inauguration of the new pleasure principle of mediated society.
We will soon be releasing an arsenal of media, including two feature films (mine is entitled exodusMelancholia), in order to combat the perpetuation of groundless aesthetics and the cinematic narrative as the basis of American identity and commodity; we are creating cinema infused with the consciousness of itself as a nihilating form – the human expression within attempting to transcend the 0 structure by infusing it with the depths of the unconscious released through an evolution of unconscious expressionism as defined by Kandinsky, informed by surrealist practice, and reflecting the existential analysis of William S. Burroughs and Francis Bacon, among many others.
Burroughs and Bacon being artists that resisted the collapse of the figurative and the illusion by transfiguring the illusion and infusing it with the subverted signs of suffering that are either rendered as simulations in cinema (and therefore undermine real suffering) or disregarded by the mass’ need to dissolve itself into the dogmatic pleasure principle at the heart of spectacle. The re-lensed expression of the internal and external degradation of humanity must be offered as a mirror to the spectator who expects the soothing relaxation and luxury of self-annihilation through cinema.
We hope you enjoy our work. I am maybe one of the more militant members of the group (there’s sort of a militant wing that’s emerged and amicably divided from those who are proponents of a less abrasive cinematic narrative), so take my words with a grain of salt, though I believe that they can be applied directly to most members of the collective’s work, including my own. If I have your permission, I would like to continue to share our work, and if you enjoy, please share it with whomever you like.
Thank you very much for your time and I hope to hear from you soon,
Sincerely,
M. Woods
847-278-5622
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/Disamedia