Soloway is pleased to present a one-night summer screening featuring films by:
Joe DeNardo, Sara Magenheimer, Superstudio, Eugène Green, and Artavazd Peleshyan
In the Baroque period people lived an oxymoron, because they continued to develop a scientific model of the universe which seemed to work by itself; but at the same time they believed that the highest reality was God, and they still had a spiritual belief. So from the point of view of rationalist thought, this is something completely contradictory. I think that this problem still exists for us today, and that cinema is a way of living the Baroque oxymoron, because the raw material of cinema is material reality--what rationalist thought considers to be finite, which does not go beyond itself, which is material truth. But the cineaste can make the audience aware, make people see spiritual energy in these fragments of material reality, and therefore make a spiritual experience out of material things.
-Eugène Green*
Joe DeNardo's films, shot on video and 16mm, are based on layering, warping, and splicing imagery. Recent works include She's a Mirror, a collaboration with fellow musician Eleanor Friedberger, and Ima Nema, a documentary tracing folk music in the Bulgarian mountains. At Soloway, DeNardo will be screening True Face, an ongoing work-in-progress.
Sara Magenheimer is a Brooklyn based artist. Recent exhibitions and screenings include: The Kitchen, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Cleopatra's, and Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY; The Living Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland; MoMA, Portland, OR; SiteWork, Raleigh, NC; and Meet Factory, Prague, Czech Republic. As a musician she has toured both nationally and internationally as a member of the bands WOOM and Flying. She has performed at Cage Gallery, Recess, MoMA P.S.1, Issue Project Room, Canada Gallery, and the Performa 13 Biennial. Her collaborative project, Bloopers, received a Triple Canopy commission and she is currently working on a commission from EMPAC, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. This summer, she will be a resident at the Shandaken Project and Lighthouse Works.
Superstudio was founded in Florence by a group of radical young architects in 1966, and was at the heart of the architectural and design avant garde until its dissolution in the late 1970s. Through photo-collages, films and exhibitions, it critiqued the modernist doctrines that had dominated 20th century design thinking. Superstudio from beginning to end stripped architecture down to its most essential meaning.
Eugène Green has been a cult figure in his native France and for audiences worldwide, beginning with his debut feature Toutes les Nuits (a 2001 film which introduced Green's trademark blend of spiritual concerns and compositional rigour), to the playful fable The Living World (2003) and the acclaimed The Portuguese Nun (2009).
Artavazd Peleshyan is an Armenian director whose film-essays--on Armenia, on the cosmos and on the theory of montage--border between documentary and avant-garde feature. He is renowned for developing a style of cinematographic perspective known as distance montage, combining perception of depth with oncoming entities. He makes extensive use of archive footage, rapidly intercut with his original material.
*From 2011 interview, Little White Lies
Image: Supersurface (film still), Superstudio,1972