Films & performances w/ live sound by LCollective
Artist in person
We are very pleased to present an evening of 16mm film, double projection, and film performance by Madison Brookshire, an LA-based artist whose work with film often incorporates painting, music, and performance. This is the final of 3 events featuring the artists taking place this week in NYC.
The roughly 60-minute program begins with a double, overlaid 16mm projection work “Passage” (2011), made in collaboration with Tashi Wada, a full-frame color shifting field in which images and sounds of symmetrical structure overlap. The work also exists as an installation.
The second work, “Veils” (2011-2013), is a 15-minute camera-less film that was originally immersed in paint and treated multiple times in a process that Brookshire describes as “a density built up of transparencies”. The work will by accompanied by a live score by LCollective.
The night concludes with the NY debut of “Fountain” (2016), a film-less, minimalist performance for Kodak Pageant projector, harmonium and guitar in which the different frequencies of flickering projection and basic sounds harmonize in an unstable equilibrium.
Madison Brookshire in attendance and available for Q&A following the program.
Special Thanks to Madison Brookshire, Evelyn Emile, and Douglas Farrand.
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Madison Brookshire is an artist and filmmaker whose work moves between experimental film, music, painting, and performance. While firmly rooted in the tradition of experimental cinema, he uses a wide variety of media — digital and analog, film, video, installation, and music — to engage viewers in deep experiences of time. He also frequently collaborates with musicians and composers, such as Tashi Wada, Mark So, and Laura Steenberge. His work has shown at REDCAT, MOCA, the Toronto International Film Festival, DokuFest, Union Docs, the New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Bradford International Film Festival, Migrating Forms, Exploratorium, Los Angeles Filmforum, Echo Park Film Center, the Hammer Museum, and Artists Television Access, among others. He has had solo exhibitions at Parker Jones, Culver City; and Presents Gallery, Brooklyn; and has been in group shows at the Torrance Art Museum; Gallery 400, Chicago; and Heliopolis, Brooklyn. His awards include a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant, an ARC grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, and an Artist Residence at the Hammer Museum and Echo Park Film Center. Currently, Brookshire teaches in the Art Department at the University of California, Riverside and works for VTS (Visual Thinking Strategies), an arts education non-profit.
LCollective is NY and NJ-based collective of musicians and composers. Their statement reads: “We all come from different countries and musical backgrounds but share a commitment to programming and performing experimental music that we love and that is rarely heard in the NY-metropolitan area. We embrace musical situations that are open and permeable in the hope that they encourage musicians, composers, and audiences alike to participate in shared listening experiences, exchanges of ideas, and community building.”
Program:
Passage
by Madison Brookshire and Tashi Wada,
Two 16mm overlapping projections, color, sound, 2011, 13 minutes
Symmetrical 16mm films overlap to produce colors, sounds, and structures not found in either individual film. Over the course of 13 minutes, twin violin canons create an arc of sound, buzzing with dissonance, as a slowly shifting field of color evolves. The experience invites viewers to engage multiple modes of time and attention.
Veils
by Madison Brookshire, 16mm film, color, silent, 2011-2013, 15 minutes
A hand-made, paint soaked film, allowing evaporation, dust, crystallization, mold, and more to inform the image. Stained with pigment and saturated with time, the result is a turbulent palimpsest with many layers and textures visible at once, each moving with its own rhythm. There is an affective quality to the excesses of the imagery that is both repetitive and ecstatic, yet the overall experience is quiet and reflective. In 2014, I added an optional live musical accompaniment for one or more people. – MB
Fountain
by Madison Brookshire, performance for 16mm projector, harmonium, and guitar, 2016, duration variable
The clear, strobing rectangle a 16mm Pageant projector produces when running at silent speed without any film in it flickers just below the threshold necessary to maintain the illusion of continuous light and starts to induce minor hallucinations. A single sustained note on an electric guitar, harmonizes with the low hum the projector makes (around 60 Hz), then a chord from a harmonium harmonizes with the first chord. The harmonium changes pitch ever so slightly depending on how much air is moving through it. All this combines to produce a steady, yet unstable harmony that resonates with the flicker (tuned as it is to the projector) and, though I know of no reason why this should be, any change in the beating of the frequencies appears to affect the hallucinations induced by the flicker.
If this sounds overwhelming, it is actually quite dry. One can go very deep into the experience and yet is never far from the surface, the beginning as it were, when nothing appears to be happening. Therefore, it is moving and static at once.
Time is not ideal and removed; it is contingent, real, and immanent. Fountain is not a film, it is a frequency—time that becomes material and inhabitable. It is flat, infinitely flat, but with attention (and time), it fills the mind, becomes an environment, a space or place to be. No transcendence—all of it feeble, contingent, and fleeting—the harmonium like a heartbeat, the projector a frail performer. The sound is imperfect, the tuning unjust and irrational, but relationships become audible, visible, experiential, inhabitable. We feel time’s embrace.
One can go very deep, very far into the experience—and yet snap back in an instant. Nothing is happening. Yet we are in touch with a repetition at the heart of time itself. Sometimes, one can feel oneself becoming several, beating, like frequencies. Fragmentation of identity: self is a sensation of pattern and recurrence. – MB