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
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 projector’s machine materialism into ethereal experiences.
For tonight’s event, Gibson and Recoder team with sound artist Ben Owen to premiere Entanglements for Four Projectors, a performance for 16mm projectors with live audio.
“Scratched 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.” – 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 1–22, 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 “think tank” 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 York’s first performance biennial, Performa 05, in 2005, followed by Performa 07 in 2007. www.performa-arts.org
Tickets - $7, available at door.
