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Project Website: http://slought.org/content/11173/
Please join us for this casual evening of film screenings.
Burt Barr began working in video in 1984. Reshaping traditional film and television narrative, Burt Barr's understated narratives, which include minimalist fiction, wry anecdotes, and nonlinear performance documents, relay their stories through precise, lucid imagery and a spare use of language. His performance works often blur the line between fiction and document, transforming conventional documentary technique by allowing a narrative line to emerge from his subject. In recent years he has translated these formal and narrative strategies into works that take the form of video projection installations. Burt Barr's work has been broadcast on public television and exhibited internationally, at festivals and institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the San Sebastian Film and Video Festival, Spain; The Reina Sofia Museum; Madrid, Spain; the Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Berlin Film Festival; The Platform Gallery, Turkey; Festival du Nouveau Cinema et de la Video, Montreal; and the International Center of Photography, New York. In Burt Barr's Aeros (1990), working at night, under the glare of automobile headlights, a man scours and restores the facade of a building in New York's Soho district. With this visual metaphor, Barr opens Aeros, a look at the evolution of Trisha Brown's dance work Astral Convertible, choreographed by Brown with sets and costumes by Robert Rauschenberg. (1990, 32:14 min, color, sound). Courtesy of the artist.
Best known today as an animator, Robert Breer was an American painter in Paris during the 1950s when he began exploring the film medium. With roots in the graphic cinema of Richter and Eggeling, Breer began creating animations with his first series of films, Form Phases I-IV (1952-1954). Following these first experiments, he moved on to study motion through his flip books and then worked in collage films. At the end of the 1950s, he returned to New York, where he continues to work as a filmmaker, painter, and sculptor. With more than 40 films to his credit, Breer has established himself as a pioneering entertainer and artist of short, playful animations and self-propelled sculptures. He infuses his work with a dry wit and visual cleverness, despite being rarely screened in the United States. "Single images one after another in quick succession fusing into motion... this is cinema." (Robert Breer, 1959) Selections from the "recreation" collection will be screened, including : Form Phases IV (1954, 5 minutes); REcreation (1957, 2 min.), A Man and His Dog Out for Air (1957, 2 min.), Jamestown Baloos (1957, 5 min.), Blazes (1961, 3 min.), 69 (1968, 5 min.), Fuji (1974, 9 min.), LMNO (1978, 10 min.), Swiss Army Knife with Rats and Pigeons (1980, 6 min.), Bang! (1986, 10 min.), and Time Flies (1997, 6 min). Courtesy of the artist.
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Still from "Aeros"