In Amy & Iva Group INC., collaborators Amy Frear and Iva Yos present a “confidential” video conference between corporate bigwigs (played by the artists) as they plan cover-ups of a variety of outlandish PR nightmares. The frames that the characters inhabit are bordered by bouncing text and a generic spinning globe, tongue-in-cheek references to sanitized corporate aesthetics.

Cartoonish ink drawings illustrate the characters’ plans, weaving a secondary visual narrative throughout the piece. Similar illustrations appear elsewhere in Yos’s work: last year she toured a thirty-minute comedy show titled This Caterpillar Wants to Give You a Kiss, in which she explains one hundred of her humorous drawings.

Frear and Yos’s film is brimming with absurdist comedy. Characters wear oversized suits and draw with oversized pens. With bulldozing confidence, they brainstorm ridiculous solutions to ridiculous problems, like a symbolic stipend for a chinchilla. Their flippant identification of scapegoats is chillingly evocative of real-life corporate pragmatism.

Created during the current pandemic, Amy & Iva Group INC. explores the increasing relevance of so-called “Zoom culture” and offers a satirical take on face-saving corporate conduct.

Following Monday’s premiere, join the artists and Lino Kino in conversation on Wednesday, September 2.