9/18/17 // A Salon With Vanessa Renwick

Posted September 11th, 2017 in Canyon Cinema 50, Canyon Cinema Salon, News / Events

A Salon with Vanessa Renwick

A Salon with Vanessa Renwick
Monday, September 18th, 2017 // 7:30pm (doors 7:00pm)
16 Sherman Street, San Francisco
Facebook Event

“While hitchhiking around in the early 80’s I tied up my dog in the SFAI courtyard, snuck into a screening at the SFAI and was exposed to Near The Big Chakra and Hermes Bird. There were other films, but those two films are what I remember from that screening. My mind was blown. I stumbled upon the book Seeing The Light by James Broughton at City Lights and it became my bible. Later, while attending Columbia College, I was often told that I should go to the Art Institute of Chicago instead. I did not, but I was employed there as an artist model and took in a lot of what was offered there. I caught a screening of Kubelka’s Unsere Afrikareise, and its searing, seething brilliance hit me with the same piercing force of those other two films. Raw, base, blunt — pussy, cock, life, death, in your face, speaking truth to power — I remembered one of Broughton’s pledges to take in his book — ‘to swear to attempt the impossible, to exceed myself, and to venture where no one has ever pushed a button before.’” – Vanessa Renwick

A Salon with Vanessa Renwick
SF Hitch, by Vanessa Renwick (2012, 5 min, color)
Toxic Shock, by Vanessa Renwick (1983, 3 min, color)
Near the Big Chakra, by Alice Anne Parker (1972, 17 min, color)
Olympia, by Vanessa Renwick (1984/1998, 11 min, B&W)
Hermes Bird, by James Broughton (1979, 11 min, color)
Unsere Afrikareise, by Peter Kubelka (1966, 13 min, color)
9 is a secret, by Vanessa Renwick (2002, 6 min, B&W)

Vanessa Renwick has been a singular voice in the experimental cinema for over 20 years. Eschewing an allegiance to any one medium or form, Renwick builds authentic moving image works revealing an insatiable curiosity and unflinching engagement with the world around her. Often focusing her lens on themes of westward expansion and the locales of her adopted home, the Pacific Northwest, Renwick uses avant-garde formal elements to explore radical politics and environmental issues. An artist who often self-distributes, her screening history reads as a map of independent cinema in North America. She has screened work in hundreds of venues internationally, institutional and not, including The Museum of Modern Art, Light Industry, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Art Basel, Oberhausen, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Centre Pompidou, Bread and Puppet Theater and True/False Film Festival, among many others.

An artist by nature, not by stress of research. She puts scholars to rout by embracing nature’s teaching problems that have fretted trained minds. Working in experimental and poetic documentary forms, her iconoclastic work embodies her interest in landscape and transformation, and relationships between bodies and landscapes, and all sorts of borders.

Canyon Cinema is thankful for the long term support of the George Lucas Family Foundation. Dedicated project funding for Canyon Cinema 50 has been generously provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, Owsley Brown III Foundation, Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation and The Fleishhacker Foundation.