Now available: three DVDs collecting the films of Lynn Marie Kirby
Posted November 27th, 2019 in New Acquisitions, New DVDs, News / Events
Lynn Marie Kirby is a San Francisco-based artist who makes films, videos, and site responsive installations. Three DVDs that compile works made between 1997 and 2010 are now available for individual and institutional purchase from Canyon Cinema.
Translation Series (1997-2003 | 27 minutes | COLOR)
“[Kirby] is indeed an artist whose work represents simultaneously artistic explorations and philosophical revolutions. She thinks with tools (cameras, screens, celluloid, etc.), exploring them as if they were intellectual materials in their own right…positioning herself not in ‘front’ of images but into them, within their structure, and making explode that which we usually take for granted…” – Etel Adnan
Contains Salon: 61 rue de Maubeuge, Couloir, L’entree, and Scans: 1-55.
Time Dilations (1999-2010 | 46 minutes | COLOR | SOUND)
“These works involve Kirby’s manipulation of recorded material, but always with the aim of liberating time from the flux of the image track. Through a practice of live editing, literally ‘scratching’ the time line, Kirby creates ‘time holes’ at points where the hard drive simply can’t keep up with her movement.
‘Each live improvisation,’ she explains, ‘was with a ‘gesture in time’…laid down in the time line. Moving back and forth created time gaps and new time relationships, often not linear. These time/space relationships were not determined only by me, but by the hardware/software of the machine.'”
-Email exchange, Kirby/Hansen, 2007
Contains Photons in Paris: image encodings, Out of Step, Study in Choreography for Camera Remote, Six Shooter, Fields of Grain, Off the Tracks, and Twilight’s Last Gleaming.
Latent Light Excavations (2003-2007 | 76 minutes | COLOR)
“The recent work of Lynn Marie Kirby can be understood as a way of using seemingly transcendent aesthetic forms to achieve a deeper form of immanence…While Kirby is clearly an heir to the legacies of formalist modernism in film and video art, her work moves through this trajectory and back again. Like earlier experimental filmmakers, Kirby employs painterly abstraction, the radical condensation of time, and the direct registration of space on the material substrate of the medium. But she almost always uses formal schemas in order to return to the things themselves. Kirby examines the uniqueness, irreducibility, and the emotional ramifications of the particular moment, locating the palpable residues of the everyday. But like later, more systematic filmmakers such as Gehr, Akerman, and Snow, Kirby attends to the larger patterns, repetitions, and reversals that organize both perception and our lived experience. Kirby’s work uses shape and form to excavate (her term, and an absolutely apposite one) both the particularity of individual moments, and the cycles of lived, embodied existence, of artistic creation, of motherhood and family life, or urban dwelling and international transit. Her work is, ultimately, about the structures we use to access our world, and what we care most about in it.”
– Michael Sicinski
Contains Compression and Tension (Golden Gate Bridge Exposure: Poised for Parabolas, Black Belt Test Exposure: Sempai James Finds His Line, St. Ignatius Church Exposure: Lenten Light Conversions), Refracted Case Histories (Jacaranda Tree, Chalon Road Exposure: Brazilian Transplant, Huntington Gardens, Giant Stipa Exposure: California Native, Mount St. Mary’s Chapel Exposure: Galican Import), Latent Image Excavations: Reno (Chapel of the Bells Wedding Exposure: To have and to hold, Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation Exposure: As long as the rivers flow, El Dorado Casino Exposure: House Stands on 17), Polk and Filbert Street Exposure: Intersection, Lebanon Exposure: Salvaged from the open sea, Karate Class Exposure: Three Variations, Requiescat, and Russian Arc: Across Cinematic Time.
