Ten Ways of Doing Time – 03
Pictured Stephanie Vella
Collaboration with Laura Parnes
www.lauraparnes.com
January 31st, 2012
Archive for January, 2012
Dreamful Slumbers – 08
Originally posted on Cine Soiree 1/15/12
http://cinesoiree.blogspot.com/2012/01/snow-and-fotopoulos.html
Snow and Fotopoulos
Many events all concurrent with one another: Occupy Cinema at Anthology, and the openings for Michael Snow at Jack Shainman Gallery, and James Fotopoulos at Microscope Gallery. Attended both the Snow and Fotopoulos shows — but it can sometimes be difficult being too many places all at once.
Tempting to draw comparisons between the two exhibits of artwork by filmmakers, but what was truly striking by way of comparison: issue of space — that is to say, the available square footage of gallery space — and its influence upon the grandly minimal arrangement at the Chelsea exhibit, with its cavernous white expanses, or the intimate and abundantly covered walls — seeking to maximize the miniscule — in Bushwick’s aptly named Microscope Gallery. Is larger space the ideal? The hanging of the Fotopoulos show invited the perusing of the drawings through a meandering of the eye from one work to the next: up, down, this work to the side, and that work above or below, making sequences and comparisons through a zigzagging from one drawing to another. A larger space might not have been as conducive this type of hanging: Perhaps an eye-level ribbon of drawings — providing a more linear experience — would have been more appropriate to a large space?
Intimate spaces seem to have been increasing within the past few years: Microscope, Spectacle Theater, and even the storefront-located Union Docs, all functioning within small-sized spaces of one sort or another (compared to the full-sized theater seating 100 or more). The little Maya Deren Theater (which seats 72) on the ground floor of Anthology seems cavernous compared to these more recent venues. Of course Bradley Eros’s E.P.I.C. = E(xtreme) P(rivate) I(ntimate) C(inema), in which several screenings took place for an audience of exactly one, may be the ultimate example of this small-sized venue (or perhaps the Edison Kinetoscope, which by its nature can have no more than one viewer at a time?).
***
And so begins the new year and a new year of Cine Soirees as the blog is now one year old.
Cheers!
January 30th, 2012
Dreamful Slumbers – 07
http://hyperallergic.com/45290/james-fotopulous-microscope-gallery/
Films Born Out of Drawings
by Katarína Hybenová on January 19, 2012
The entrance to Microscope Gallery on St. Charles Place. (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)
After much media ado about the birth as performance art by Marni Kotak, you have to wonder if the wild media-saturated waters around Microscope Gallery calmed down. This Bushwick gallery has gotten back into its routine and it seems like the co-owners, Elle Burchill and Andrea Monti, are truly enjoying the change of pace.
After the Monday night screening of a film by Soviet-Armenian filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov, Elle Burchill told me that their Event Series has been doing really well. Being very prolific, Microscope hosts art film screenings and performances almost every Monday night. Monday events usually complement the current exhibition or are related to it in some way. Burchill says that recently they even had to send home some unlucky people when they couldn’t jam in anymore into the 23-f00t-long space for a recent event. There were already 45 people inside. It is notable (and commendable) that Microscope Gallery actually pays the performers and the filmmakers who are often present at the screenings. It is amazing to watch a white box gallery space turn into a black box screening room at night, and, if you’re lucky, you can watch films by artists who exhibit on the walls of the gallery.
Drawings by James Fotopoulos.
This complementary approach that marries drawing and video is very familiar to Chicago-based artist James Fotopoulos, whose drawings are currently being featured at the St. Charles Place gallery. Two hundred of the artist’s drawings cover the walls and they were all created while he was working on two of his recent films, Thick Comb, Chimera and Alice in Wonderland. As part of his process, Fotopoulos sketches every element of his films until he perfects them and they could stand on their own as works of art. They encapsulate his ideas and feel singular yet connected to one another. “ … So if a film collapsed, the concept existed,” Fotopulous explains.
Through his “film drawings,” Fotopoulos explores the tension between process and completion. “Is a sketch more alive as an idea than the completed work?“ he seems to ask.
Some of the “Red” drawings by Fotopulous.
The color that dominates most of the drawings at Microscope is red, so the works are simply referred to as Reds, while a parallel series, Blues, hangs on an adjacent wall. The artist works mainly in charcoal. His subject matter includes personal objects, parts of the body, personal symbols from his youth, memories and dreams. The drawings feel cinematic, maybe even hypnotic. His reds feel inviting, and despite many drawings being personal, I didn’t feel “excluded” or pushed away as a viewer, to the contrary, I felt very welcomed into his graphic world.
One of the walls of drawings.
While the drawings of Fotopoulos are warm and welcoming, his films are abstract and non-narrative. On January 23, Microscope will feature a night of the film and video by James Fotopoulos and Laura Parnes Sublimated Violence & Visual Excess, as part of their regular Monday events. It will surely offer another window into the artist’s world alive with color, images and untold stories.
A view of some of the artist’s “Blue” series.
Dreamful Slumbers, Works by James Fotopoulos is on view in Microscope Gallery (4 St. Charles Place, Bushwick, Brooklyn) through February 6.
January 27th, 2012
Ten Ways of Doing Time – 02
Pictured Jim Fletcher and James Fotopoulos
Collaboration with Laura Parnes
www.lauraparnes.com
January 24th, 2012
Dreamful Slumbers – 05
Microscope Gallery release:
SUBLIMATED VIOLENCE & VISUAL EXCESS
James Fotopoulos and Laura Parnes in person
screening together for the first time
MONDAY JANUARY 23, 7PM
Admission $6
In connection with the current exhibition “Dreamful Slumbers” drawings and videos by James Fotopoulos, we present a unique screening and visual dialogue between Fotopoulos’ 16mm film “The Nest” (2003) and the video “Blood and Guts in High School” (2006) by Laura Parnes. The two acclaimed filmmakers have never before screened together, but have over the years recognized their shared interest in themes and approaches including formal film, narrative structures and genre. In these earlier works “The Nest” and “Blood and Guts in High School” both employ stylized dialog and acting to create highly charged worlds of psychosexual drama, sublimated violence and visual excess. The two are now collaborating on a feature, Ten Ways of Doing Time, which resurrects these concepts in a prison drama with science fiction motifs that explores codes of repression and domination through the framework of the experimental narrative.
PROGRAM
“Blood & Guts in High School”
By Laura Parnes
video, color, sound, 40 minutes 2006
“Blood and Guts in High School” features actress Stephanie Vella in a series of video installations that re-imagine punk-feminist icon Kathy Acker’s book of the same title. The book received notoriety from 1978-1982 during the rise of Reagan republicanism and the emergence of punk rock. In Parnes’ interpretation, each video-chapter presents a typical scene in the life of Janie bracketed by US news events from the time period in which the book was written.
“Filmed on bare-bones sets put together in gallery spaces, the video is a model of how to bring off an ambitions project with scant resources, and also of how to respect source material while transforming it. And where Acker’s novels have a quick-hit crash-and-burn intensity, Ms. Parnes’s video floats like a shark, forever hovering, but always watching and moving.”-Holland Cotter, New York Times
“The sets are elegantly austere, the framing remarkably succinct. (Parnes’s favorite shot is a claustrophobic high-angle close-up that places Janie’s antagonist in the frame over her shoulder.) Each line of dialogue is cushioned by an arch pause. There are no interruptions; everything is given due space.” David Velasco, Artforum
“The Nest”
by James Fotopoulos
2003, 16mm, 78min, color, sound mono
Filmed in saturated colors on out-of-date film stocks with an aggressive soundtrack, the story of The Nest is told – the marriage of two young professionals unravels after an unnamed accident physically and emotional traumatizes the wife. Government agents, shadowy investigators and transgender beings appear, trying to solve the nervous-breakdown-mystery of secret alien forces that chose the couple as their target. In-camera tricks, drawings, derelict optical printing, miniatures, puppets and prosthetic makeup effects convey the dual collapse of the protagonists’ lives and the film structure as one unified entity.
“The Nest’s physiological and psychological are one and the same, perhaps making it his most nakedly emotional feature yet, and firmly positioning his narrative work in that slender alternate stream inhabited by filmmakers like Bresson, Warhol, and (in the right mood) Sokhurov. In the coolness of its surface construction, its sly wit, and the surprising heat of its emotions, The Nest suggests that other great suburban tract of the ‘80s, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, but rather than being about a toxic airborne event, The Nest simply is one.” (Spencer Parsons, Cinematexas)
“Chicago-based underground cinema whizkid James Fotopoulos (who, at age 27, has created more than 90 films and videos of varying lengths) offers up a bleak and cryptically funny assault on suburban anomie in his latest, The Nest. … Fotopoulos creeps around the edges of character and drama, conjuring moods of paranoia and dread that suggest the carefully ordered routines of daily life are a kind of opiate administered by sinister forces. Shooting in harsh 16mm color, Fotopoulos renders The Nest in a typically Spartan, forbidding style that makes it seem as though he is some extraterrestrial visitor photographing humans for the first time, interrupted only by pockets of crude, stick-figure animation and intricately layered superimpositions. Fittingly, soundtrack eschews a conventional musical score in favor of industrial sounds that form their own kind of whirring, grating symphony.” – Scott Foundas, Variety
more info www.microscopegallery.com
tel: 347.925.1433
J/M/Z – Myrtle/Broadway
L – Morgan Ave or Jefferson Street
B54 Willoughby/Myrtle stop is directly across the street
January 23rd, 2012
Chimera 37
At Anthology Film Archives
Photo by Jeanne Liotta
http://www.jeanneliotta.net
January 19th, 2012
Mother Nature – 02
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
William Butler Yeats
THE SECOND COMING
1919
January 18th, 2012