From: Thomas Beard (email suppressed)
Date: Sun Nov 29 2009 - 10:05:51 PST
Summer Knowledge
William E. Jones
Anne Charlotte Robertson
Michael Robinson
Paul Sharits
Leslie Thornton
Emily Wardill
Artists Space
38 Greene Street, 3rd Floor
New York, New York
http://www.artistsspace.org
December 4-19, 2009
Curated by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, Summer Knowledge is a series of
one-person screenings presenting a multi-generational selection of artists
working in the moving image. In keeping with the project of Beard and
Halterıs Brooklyn venue Light Industry, each event will allow time for
dialog and discussion.
Summer Knowledge launches the first in a series of programs with Beard and
Halter through December 2010.
Michael Robinson: Flowers in the Attic
Friday, December 4, 7:30pm
Since 2000, Michael Robinson has created a body of film and video work that
combines the formal vocabulary of avant-garde cinema with evocative
appropriations of late 20th-century media artifacts, blending these
materials into distinctively uncanny experiences, structured with the soft
seductions of a pop song. Videogame environments and Catholic liturgy, the
anodyne aesthetics of National Geographic and a histrionic scene from Little
House on the Prairie flow together to explore the contours of collective
memory through a poetics of devotion and loss.
Titles will include:
Chiquitita and the Soft Escape, 16mm, 2003, 10 mins
you donıt bring me flowers, 16mm, 2005, 8 mins
The General Returns from One Place to Another, 16mm/video, 2006, 11 mins
And We All Shine On, 16mm, 2006, 7 mins
Victory Over the Sun, 16mm, 2007, 13 mins
Hold Me Now, video, 2008, 5 mins
All Through the Night, video, 2008, 5 mins
If There Be Thorns, 16mm/video, 2009, 12 mins
Emily Wardill: The Answer to the Riddle Was an Image
Saturday, December 5, 7:30pm
"The answer to the riddle was an image, but that image was remembered to be
different from the way it had originally existed."
Recalling both the compositional rigors of structural-materialist filmmakers
like Peter Gidal as well as the inventive, lo-fi theatricality of New
Romantics such as Derek Jarman, the films of Emily Wardill are a kind of
strange, brilliant marriage of two wildly disparate traditions of British
underground cinema. Radiating outward from a diverse set of materials--the
writings of Nietzsche, a hypnosis case study, medieval iconography, and the
chromophotography of Étienne Jules Marey--her work maintains a philosophical
density and an agile visual sense. It represents a profoundly idiosyncratic
approach to film form that also addresses some of the mediumıs most
fundamental questions, of the relationship between what we see and what we
know, of representation and its limits.
Titles will include:
Born Winged Animals and Honey Gatherers of the Soul, 16mm, 2005, 9 mins
Basking in What Feels Like 'An Ocean of Grace' I Soon Realise That I'm Not
Looking at It, but Rather I Am It, Recognising Myself, 16mm, 2006, 8 mins
Ben, 16mm, 2007, 10 mins
Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck, 16mm, 2007, 10 mins
The Diamond (Descartes' Daughter), 16mm, 2008, 11 mins
William E. Jones: v.o. + Film Montages (For Peter Roehr)
Friday, December 11, 7:30pm
Based in Los Angeles, William E. Jones creates film, video and publications
that investigate pornography and other marginal media as ephemeral archives
of queer experience. This eveningıs event presents his featurette v.o.
(2006, 59 mins), a grubbily austere, conceptually elegant collection of
dramatic non-sex scenes from the William Higgins-era golden age of gay porn
films, set to a variety of disjunctively highbrow European soundtracks: an
interview with Jean Genet, or clips of dialogue from films by the likes of
Werner Schroeter and Raul Ruiz. To be shown with Jonesı Film Montages (For
Peter Roehr) (2006, 11 mins), a video made in honor of the German artist
that takes simple repetition as its first principle.
Anne Charlotte Robertson: Selections from the Five Year Diary
Saturday, December 12, 7:30pm
Totaling over thirty-six hours in length, Anne Charlotte Robertsonıs Five
Year Diary constitutes one of the most epic works every recorded on Super 8:
a densely collaged audio-visual chronicle of her daily life in Massachusetts
and her battles with manic depression, paranoia and borderline
schizophrenia. In the course of the Diary (which, begun in 1981, now covers
well over five years), Robertson documents her own breakdowns and
hospitalizations, her obsessive love for Doctor Who actor Tom Baker, her
battles with weight, the side effects of drug therapies, and the death of
her three-year-old niece, Emily. As Robertson describes it, her often
harrowing Diary tells ³the story of a mindıs survival.²
³I think of my diaries as a materialization of the present, which is a
storehouse. I used to think of them in terms of showing them to a man who
would say to me, What have you been doing all your life?ı and then Iıd show
them to him.² AR
Leslie Thornton: Early Films, 1975-1987
Friday, December 18, 7:30pm
Presented with UbuWeb and introduced by Kenneth Goldsmith
Leslie Thorntonıs lush, complex film and video works explore the mechanisms
of desire and meaning, while probing past the boundaries of language and
narrative conventions. Resisting easy categorization, Thornton's works are
steeped in theoretical portent and filled with rich and intuitive imagery,
experimental narratives crossing science fiction, ethnographic, and
documentary forms.
In preparation for the arrival of her early films on UbuWeb, Thornton will
present a screening of original 16mm and digital transfers, including a
newly restored version of her seminal Peggy and Fred In Hell. For the
occasion, her work will be uploaded and launched on UbuWeb during the show,
and some titles will be shown comparatively, on both old and new formats.
I think of the web as sprawl. What if the internet was just Ubu, a place of
treasures, of self-contained works with shape and history? I want to see
these old films show up online, whispers of another sense of space. LT
Titles will include:
X-TRACTS, 16mm, 1975, 9 mins
All Right You Guys, 16mm, 1976, 16 mins
Jennifer, Where Are You?, 16mm, 1981, 10 mins
Oh, China, Oh, 1983, 16mm, 3 mins
Peggy and Fred in Hell: The Prologue, 1985, 16mm, 21 mins
She Had He So He Do He To Her, 16mm, 1987, 5 mins
Paul Sharits: Analytical Studies I-IV
Saturday, December 19, 3-8pm
Made between 1971 and 1976, Paul Sharitsı rarely-shown series Analytical
Studies consists of four sections, each devoted to a specific aspect of film
technology, containing several sub-sections that play through various formal
permutations of the given characteristic.
This event will take place over an afternoon, with each work introduced by a
guest speaker. After the screenings, the event concludes with a panel
discussion on Sharitsı work.
Analytical Studies I: The Film Frame, 16mm, 1971-76, 25 mins
A set of pure color studies, each exploring one dominant hue. Their rhythmic
structure mimics the ³typical fortification illusions preceding a migraine
attack.²
1. Modular Blue
2. Green Matrix
3. White Field
4. Orange Field
5. Pink Modulation A
6. Pink Modulation B
7. Temporal frameworks
8. Migraine Onset A
9. Migraine Onset B
10. Migraine Onset C
11. Migraine Onset D
Analytical Studies II: Un-Frame-Lines, 16mm, 1971-1976, 30 mins
A highly varied and playful series of short sketches involving induced
camera "mistakes," printing "errors" and various "assaults" upon film.
Analytical Studies III: Color Frame Passages, 16mm, 1973-74, 22 mins
In this series, the first section becomes the subject matter for the
subsequent six, each going back to the original material with varying
degrees and forms of reflexivity.
Section I: "Specimen"
Section II: "Divergent Strip Vectors"
Section III: "Document"
Section IV: "Strip in Strip"
Section V: "Strip of Strip, A"
Section VI: "Strip of Strip, B"
Section VII: "Strip of Strip of Strip B"
Analytical Studies IV: Blank Color Frames, 16mm, 1975-76, 15 mins
Like Analytical Studies I, these short works each develop a different
rhythmic and/or melodic idea using only rapid successions of color frames,
here analyzed through rephotography.
Specimen II
Specimen III
Specimen IV
Diagonal Temporality B
Diagonal Temporality C
Temporal Frame B
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For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.