Canyon-on-Demand: Recent Acquisitions, now streaming until Dec 1

Posted November 25th, 2020 in Announcements, Events and Screenings, New Acquisitions, News / Events


Canyon Cinema: Recent Acquisitions
Online Nov 24 – Dec 1, 2020

As 2020 winds to a close, we look back at some recent additions to the Canyon Cinema collection and celebrate the work of our artist members in this latest “Canyon-on-Demand” offering. The program features films and videos by Bill Basquin, Elizabeth Block, Emily Chao, Janie Geiser, Tomonari Nishikawa, Charlotte Pryce, Lynne Sachs, Phil Solomon, Mark Street, Robert Todd, and Stan Vanderbeek.

Link to stream: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/newatcanyon

Program:

Crossroad (Phil Solomon with Mark LaPore, 2005, 5 min, color, sound, digital file)

“Two close friends broke through to a new dimension driving off the beaten path of road warriors, off the grid, into an eerie oasis of suspended time. Through counterintuitive disobedience, discarding the aggressive goals and rules of the game, they tricked their way with an open sesame into an unsuspected pastoral setting of challenging pivots and loops. This hidden realm has a temperament and pacing utterly at odds with the design of videogames, a landscape of eternal returns a well of anomalous poetry.

“Solomon writes that originally this work was made ‘as a prayer, an offering, a “get well soon” card…’ for a friend who was not expected to survive. But 20 years later that friend is alive and well and both the makers of CROSSROAD are gone.

“CROSSROAD (2005) now serves as a prelude, the rightful portal, a kind of digital ‘stele’ or an inscribed monument that leads us into IN MEMORIAM, the Solomon triptych that begins to surface in 2017. CROSSROAD, an invocation for convalescence, a transfixing remedial playing field. It offers each viewer entry into a peripheral world presenting us with an ontological dilemma, a practical model for both contemplative and active attention.” (Mark McElhatten)

As Long As There Is Breath (Emily Chao, 2020, 2 min, color, sound, digital file)

An assembly of collected memories shatter the interior and open portals to the outside. Completed during shelter-in-place in Northern California. Commissioned by Small Press Traffic.

A Month of Single Frames (Lynne Sachs, 2019, 14 min, color, sound, digital file)

Made with and for Barbara Hammer, using material recorded by Barbara during a 1998 residency. Through her own filmmaking, Lynne explores Barbara’s experience of solitude and brings us all together in multiple spaces and times.

Color Time (Elizabeth Block, 2004/2018, 3 min, color, sound, digital file or 16mm)

“Imagine an eye” ruled only by the laws of a Bolex camera, color reversal film, and an idealistic filmmaker with the audacity to believe that “each object encountered through life [is] an adventure of perception.” I made this film in defiance of a digital world, longing for the tactility of mechanical representation to make a sketch of the natural world, the light.

Amusement Ride (Tomonari Nishikawa, 2019, 6 min, color, sound, digital file or 16mm)

Shot with a telephoto lens from inside a cabin of Cosmo Clock 21, a Ferris wheel at an amusement park in Yokohama, Japan. The distorted image shows the structure of the Ferris wheel, focusing on the intermittent vertical movement, which resembles the movement of a film at the gate of a film projector or camera.

Falling (Rob Todd, 2014, 7 min, color, sound, digital file or 16mm)

FALLING is made from a series of gestural performances conjuring the darkness of the fall: the action, the season, the spiritual/psychic state. There are three different (gestural) approaches to the “walks” taken here.

The first is a simple slow drifting from my apartment into the realm just outside my door, moving lazily with and through the forms at play there, as the breath of the wind shifts throughout the environs.

The second is a collection of still images snapped at intervals along the way to the place in which I work, an evolving dynamic of glimpses that trace a disjunctive, impressionistic pathway describing the route of my life.

The third is the Falling that is the dark undercurrent that thrums within these spaces, following a retraced path back toward home, but focusing on the ground, pushing through the darkness in to the dead elements that make up the world beneath our feet, amidst starbursts of enigmatic origins.

Poemfield No. 1 (Stan VanDerBeek, 1967, 5 min, color, silent, digital file)

COMPUTER ART SERIES is animated computer/graphic films. The series is called POEMFIELD. All of these films explore variations of poems, computer graphics, and in some cases combine live action images and animation collage; all are geometric and fast moving and in color. There are eight films in the computer animated art series. As samples of the art of the future all the films explore variations of abstract geometric forms and words. In effect these works could be compared to the illuminated manuscripts of an earlier age. Now typography and design are created at speeds of 100,000 decisions per second, set in motion a step away from “mental movies.”

Reverse Shadow (Janie Geiser, 2019, 8 min, color, sound, digital file)

Rivers run red, planes hover above the water, ships travel in darkness, and towers loom and topple. Disaster seems imminent as the hunters prepare to shoot. The body is a soft target.

I had a recurring dream that I was walking in the woods and a hunter mistook me for a bird. I could hear him moving through the forest. I always woke up before the gun was fired, but that feeling of apprehension would stay with me throughout the day. Lately, even without dreaming this dream, that apprehension is present.

Pwdre Ser the rot of stars (Charlotte Pryce, 2018, 6 min, color, sound, digital file)

The film depicts an encounter with a mysterious, luminous, electrical substance. Inspired equally by medieval accounts of visionary experiences and by 19th century photography of the invisible, PWDRE SER joins Kirlian photography with hand-processed images.

Pwdre Ser is the Welsh name for a mythical substance that has been observed by many since the 1400’s.

So Many Ideas Impossible to Do All (Mark Street, 2019, 11 min, color, sound, digital file)

Made with Barbara Hammer.

A year before her death, Barbara Hammer asked me to work on a project she’d envisioned based on her correspondence (1973-85) with Jane Brakhage. She also gave me outtakes from her 1974 film JANE BRAKHAGE and told me to let the project take me wherever it led. What emerges is a portrait of Barbara as a brave and vibrant artist and a complex and nuanced long distance friendship.

Mission Movie Theatres (Bill Basquin, 1998/2005, 3 min, b&w, silent, digital file)

A portrait of the old movie theatres in the Mission neighborhood in San Francisco, photographed on Super-8mm film by the filmmaker in the Fall of 1998.


Approximate Running Time: 70 minutes