The June instance of Still/Life is a two-part program formally cleaved yet cumulatively syncretic in its attempt to mediate between the still and moving image: from the inert to the kinetic, from analog to digital, silence to sound, portraiture to performance.
A Casing Shelved
Michael Snow
1970, Canada, 45 mins, 35mm slide projection and audio file
The late Michael Snow’s seldom screened masterwork may defy the definition of both photograph and film, conceived as a single-color slide projected for forty-five minutes, accompanied only by the artist’s tape-recorded narration, describing the nominal contents of a bookcase teeming with personal objects. The purely expository execution subtly articulates a lesson in the indexicality of the image, the bookshelf itself “something between a found object and a conscious work.” (Michael Snow).
Amour
Raymond Depardon
1997, France, 10 mins, 35mm > digital
A panoramic tour – employing a Rostrum camera – through Depardon’s historic, wide-ranging gaze at quotidian life. Scenes of Parisian street-life alternate with images of far-off deserts, where the Magnum photographer would repeatedly wander in search of indecisive moments. A mercurial soundscape both animates and troubles the still images, suggesting nostalgia but also a love borne of poetic vigilance.
The End Of Photography
Judy Fiskin
2006, US, 2 mins, Super 8 > digital
A plaintive yet ironic elegy to analog photography and all its attendant effects – the reels, canisters, photochemistry, and darkrooms – which parallels a montage of fading Los Angeles stucco-and-shrub architecture. Shot on super 8 by the artist and voiced by dance/movement therapist Joan Chodorow, this portrait finds humble fidelity to the vanishings of a city and a medium.
If You Don’t Watch The Way You Move
Kevin Jerome Everson,
2023, US, 12 mins
A darkened studio where rap composers Derek “Dripp” Whitfield Jr. and Taymond “ChoSkii” Hughes attempt to lay down a new track is overtaken by the presence of a John Cage score – giving form to silence as song.
Liberian Boy
Manon Lutanie, Mati Diop
2015, France, 5 mins
Mesmeric and discomfiting record of a performance by young Jules Langlade, who’s rehearsing his Billie Jean dance moves for an upcoming annual show at the Leisure Center. Portraiture through the eyes of Mati Diop surrenders to the moment: what camera can capture the uncanny bravura of adolescent expression?
Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore
Mark Leckey
1999, UK, 15 min, color video
An assemblage of gauzy found-footage video that accrues – in true dance floor fashion, circa latter 20th century Britain – into a wistfully ecstatic contact high. Artist Mark Leckey channels the collective social energy of rave-inspired catharsis while layering his own sonic mashup, creating a skin-crawling portrait of youth: decked out in sharp trainers and fashionable jeans, phased in aspirational stupor, embodying a (seemingly contradictory) conflation of rapture and rage in an era of staunch political conservatism