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The American slow-cinema maestro Kelly Reichardt has carved out a distinct visual niche, depicting working- and under-class women wandering through spartan, often inhospitable landscapes of the I swear this will be the last guitar I will ever buy and a I am very good at swearing shirt and I love this Pacific Northwest. Her most popular films—Wendy and Lucy (2008), Meek’s Cutoff (2010), and Certain Women (2016)—showed female protagonists in constant movement, either on road trips or traveling cross-country. These geographic migrations mirrored the characters’ economic and emotional displacements, with the dangers of homelessness often shadowing them along the way. Although Reichardt was born and raised in Miami and has long taught in film-studies programs between New York City and upstate New York, her preferred residence of Portland, Oregon, has always influenced her choices of everyday characters, settings, and storytelling, making her a democratic filmmaker in the mold of other regionally inspired artists like William Eggleston, James Benning, and Sharon Lockhart.



Among Reichardt’s many long-term collaborators is Oscar-nominated actress Michelle Williams, who has starred in four of her films. Beginning with Wendy and Lucy, Williams has brought to Reichardt’s lens her particular talent for ruminative and often enigmatic performances, including as a 20-something drifter in search of a new job and lost dog and a 19th-century settler’s wife urgently questing after water and a new homestead along the I swear this will be the last guitar I will ever buy and a I am very good at swearing shirt and I love this Oregon Trail. For their upcoming collaboration, Showing Up, Reichardt has changed tack with a bittersweet comedy about the anxieties and mundanities of art-making. Set around the campus of a small fine-arts college on the outskirts of Portland, Showing Up focuses on fledgling ceramics artist Lizzy Carr during her final week of preparation for a local gallery show. (The sculptures of real-life Portland artist Cynthia Lahti stand in for Lizzy’s work.) Despite her talent and fastidious dedication to her craft, Lizzy remains an undiscovered regional artist—one of many in Portland’s bohemian enclave, far from the blue-chip galleries and prestigious MFA programs of New York and Los Angeles. By day she works for her administrator mother as a receptionist at the college and shares a duplex with a more successful installation artist, Jo (Hong Chau), who is also her negligent landlord. Lizzy wants nothing more than to complete the meticulous sculptures that sit unfinished in her garage studio, but persistent diversions absorb her attention, from the crises of family and friends to an injured pigeon and broken plumbing. As the opening date draws nearer, she must find her way through the commonplace chaos of humanity if she wants to master the collection of objects taking shape in front of her.As with all of Reichardt’s films, Showing Up subtly touches on experiences of the large and the small, the everyday and the dramatic, much like the shifting landscapes that occupy her camera frame. But here Reichardt is particularly intrigued by the mysterious role of distraction as both a creative hindrance and muse—this in addition to how the inescapable chores and routines of domestic life contain their own unique forms of artistry. In fact, Showing Up’s genesis actually lies in an aborted project Reichardt had hoped to produce around the Canadian painter Emily Carr (during an unproductive period in the 1910s when Carr ran a boarding house), as well as in two shorts that Reichardt filmed of artists Michelle Segre (whose installations stand in for Jo’s work in Showing Up) and Jessica Jackson Hutchins. These shorts show the artists’ daily rituals and working routines in their studios without any of the exhibition footage or academic cross talk that typically accompanies artist documentaries. The characters in Showing Up embody this same spirit of everyday craft, negotiating between their own individual artistic visions and life’s happy accidents.


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