From: Ed Halter (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Nov 09 2009 - 07:52:06 PST
Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 7:30pm
Not a Futurist Film but a Film Without a Future
Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder with Ben Owen
Performa 09 at Light Industry
http://www.lightindustry.org/gibsonrecoder
In their collaborative film performances, Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder
employ simple mechanical means to hypnotically elaborate ends. 16mm loops,
spray bottles, colored gels, unfocused lenses and hand-shadows combine,
through rehearsed recipes, into slowly mutating light-sculptures: morphing
color-fields, angel-white auras, fusing penumbrae, pulsing vertical lines.
Built upon occulted rhythms of film projection, their work retains a
personal, human scale, even as the viewer succumbs to its transportive
powers. Their performances melt the projectorıs machine materialism into
ethereal experiences.
For tonightıs event, Gibson and Recoder team with sound artist Ben Owen to
premiere Entanglements for Four Projectors, a performance for 16mm
projectors with live audio.
³Scratched film loops on opaque black leader emulsion provide the basic and
base material(ism) for a projective and introjective encounter for four 16mm
film projectors, two projectionists, and one projection 'noise' engineer.
The footage is not what interests us per se but the effect it has in
dispersing and/or scattering the projected light itself. If the rotating
shutter-blade which is lodged in the projector is meant not only to produce
the palpitating illusion of movement but also to obstruct our access to how
this cinematographic trick is achieved, the critical tendency would then be
to impair the basic apparatus, to take it apart piece by piece. But there is
another way! To further obstruct the obstruction. To shadow the shadow into
thinking that it is being overshadowed, overcome, overperformed. Outperform.
Imagine the shutter-blade efficiently rotating in its assembly, obliterating
not only the light but the film itself. It expresses the outburst of its
violence not knowing that its vicious cycles lacerate into the soft and
fragile emulsion of time.² SG/LR
Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder have shown their collaborative film
installations and performances at film festivals, museums, galleries, and
alternative venues since 2001. They have exhibited their work at the Whitney
Museum of American Art (NYC), The Kitchen (NYC), Robert Beck Memorial Cinema
(NYC), Mighty Robot (Brooklyn, NY), Hallwalls Contemporary Arts (Buffalo,
NY), Images Festival (Toronto, Canada), PDX (Portland, OR), Berks Filmmakers
(Reading, PA), Pittsburgh Filmmakers (PA), Janalyn Hanson White Gallery
(Cedar Rapids, IA), Collectif Jeune Cinema (Paris, France), International
Film Festival Rotterdam (The Netherlands), Hartware Medien Kunst Verein
(Dortmund, Germany), La Casa Encendida (Madrid, Spain), Museo do Chiado -
National Museum of Contemporary Art (Lisbon, Portugal), Dundee Contemporary
Arts (Dundee, Scotland), Youkobo Art Space (Tokyo, Japan), Image Forum
Festival (Yokohama & Kanazawa, Japan).
Ben Owen's current work includes improvised and graphic score based
performance, audio and video collaborations, early sound studies began with
cassettes and live radio, in tandem with stone lithography printmaking and
photographic slide projections. His process of lithographic printing is
balanced by the intended preservation and natural degradation of marks. He
finds complimentary inherent similarities between the cycles of inking and
surface reception of printmaking, mark making through drawing on printing
stones and audio marks amplified by contact mics and environmental
recordings. Ben has presented work with The Kitchen, free103point9 Wave
Farm, Millennium Film Workshop, the White Box Gallery, 106BLDG30, Issue
Project Room, Diapason Gallery for Sound and Intermedia, and The Tank in New
York; das kleine field recordings festival in Berlin, Walker Art Center in
Minneapolis, and the Kichijoji Museum in Tokyo; as well as various ongoing
radio programs on stations Resonance FM in London, WKCR Columbia University
New York, Radia Network, and Free103point9.org in New York.
About Performa 09
Performa 09, the third edition of the internationally acclaimed biennial of
new visual art performance presented by Performa, will be held in New York
City from November 122, 2009. The three-week festival will showcase new
work by more than 80 of the most exciting artists working today, in an
innovative program breaking down the boundaries between visual art, music,
dance, poetry, fashion, architecture, graphic design, and the culinary arts.
Presented in collaboration with a consortium of more than 60 arts
institutions and 25 curators, as well as a network of public spaces and
private venues across the city, Performa 09 will ignite New York City with
energy and ideas, acting as a vital ³think tank² linking minds across the
five boroughs and bringing audiences together for brilliant new performances
in all disciplines.
Performa is a non-profit multidisciplinary arts organization established by
RoseLee Goldberg in 2004, dedicated to exploring the critical role of live
performance in the history of twentieth century art and to encouraging new
directions in performance for the twenty-first century. Performa launched
New Yorkıs first performance biennial, Performa 05, in 2005, followed by
Performa 07 in 2007. www.performa-arts.org <http://www.performa-arts.org/>
Tickets - $7, available at door.
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For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.