Now Available: Ten Digital Files from Mark Street
Posted July 25th, 2024 in Announcements, New Acquisitions, New Digital Files, News / Events
Canyon Cinema is pleased to announce that ten new digital files from longtime artist member Mark Street, encompassing work completed since 2019, are now available.
“For many years Mark Street has been making small, observational films of the details and energies of public spaces in urban settings. City blocks, parking spaces, and storefronts (and the people who bustle on by them) become abstractions as viewed in reflected rain or through the scratched glass of a bus stop enclosure. These city spaces identify a place but carry the mark of time, and are not divorceable from the moment of their making. The works presented in this program are all recent works, made since the pandemic and its associated impositions of social closure and eventual re-opening. During this period, many of us who were stranded, homebound in urban places, found the types of daily walks recognizable in these films to be a rare avenue of escape and source of non-digitially-mediated stimulation. First from his home in New York, Street’s restless camera wanders as soon as it is able to Paris, Belfast, and Glasgow as well, seeking visual rhyme and reason between these places and revealing, unassuming detail by unassuming detail, specific political contexts that separate and unite them. Where art practice and legacy is often spoken of as humankind crassly leaving a mark on this much-marked planet, these streets have instead marked Street, whose camera functions not as a pen but as a foil, reflecting the city (cities) back on itself.” (Millennium Film Workshop)
A Song for Some Reason (2023, 18 minutes, color, silent, digital file)
A love song to small moments uncovered while wandering the streets with a Super 8 camera.
Clear Ice Fern (2023, 12 minutes, color, sound, digital file)
Images shot through architectural glass on Super 8 film in the dead of night in NYC. The title refers to one of the glass samples I used to frame up images of Times Square and other nightspots in NYC. The city peeks its head in as an off screen character, but the glass bends and twists it in its own warped and wonderful way.
long ago, far away (2023, 3 minutes, color, sound, digital file)
Images culled from a lot of glass slides bought at a roadside antique shop. They are animated using an antiquated magnifier/projector and a laser flashlight.
May 12, 2022 (2023, 10 minutes, color, sound, digital file)
Street life in Paris, a meandering portrait of a city at play, rest and work.
A Better Relationship With The Unknown (2022, 18 minutes, color, sound, digital file)
An investigation of issues surrounding Scottish independence, nationalism and Brexit. Voices float in and out, agreeing and disagreeing as images shot on the street in Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness create the visual world of the film.
The Grain of Belfast (2022, 6 minutes, color, sound, digital file)
A fleeting portrait of Belfast, Northern Ireland, shot on high grain color Super 8. I was looking for ghosts, and looking for traces of “the troubles.”
New Beginnings and False Starts (2021, 2 minutes, color, sound, digital file)
A New Year’s card that looks backwards and considers what might be to come. A collage made up of outtakes from the set of The Quick and the Dead and educational filmstrips. (Footage courtesy Craig Baldwin.)
Sorties (2021, 30 minutes, color, sound, digital file)
A pandemic diary filmed mostly in NYC. From the uncertain first months when every foray felt perilous to various re openings, outings are recorded and reflections shared. Stills punctuate abstract and documentary footage, offering a collage of mediums in the face of the unknowable. “Sorties” is a military term — a mission launched from a defensive position. That’s sort of what a walk felt like in March 2020 in NYC. And then of course things changed; cases went up and down, the science evolved, fear waxed and waned. Of course, the pandemic continues; but I had to limit myself in making the film; March 2020-August 2021.
Flutter (2020, 14 minutes, color, sound, digital file)
Fragments and minor moments coalesce and argue in this paean to overlooked and forgotten sketches. Recorded over 5 years in various cities around the world. A shadow dances, a kite dives into the ground, a smoker exhales in a public market: this is a song about looking when you’re not at all sure what you’re looking for. And a testament to the ethos of always carrying a camera even when you don’t know why.
Morning, Noon, Night; Water, Land and Sky (2019, 17 minutes, color, sound, digital file)
Archival footage of a scuba exploration of a sunken ship gives way to scenes that explore the working rhythms of the current Brooklyn Navy Yard as well as conjuring and imagining ghosts of past technologies and characters. The film summons both the immediacy of the here and now and the persistence of history : a moving palimpsest that forces fragments of the past to mingle with the sights and sounds of the present unfolding. Viewers dive under the surface of water, watch earth being moved, see wisps of smoke in the sky.
