Canyon Cinema presents Lynn Marie Kirby: the insufficient frame, March 30, 2025
Posted March 5th, 2025 in Announcements, Events and Screenings, News / Events
Lynn Marie Kirby: the insufficient frame
Sunday, March 30, 3:40pm
The Roxie Theater, San Francisco
Presented by Canyon Cinema in association with San Francisco Cinematheque
Lynn Marie Kirby in person
Admission: $15 General / $12 Friends of Canyon & SF Cinematheque Members
Event tickets here
By calling attention to the screen as more than a blank reflective surface, Kirby insists that “screen” is a complex set of meanings and uses—the environment itself is a screen.
– Jeffrey Skoller, from “Reflector to Transmitter: rethinking the idea of screen in the recent work of Lynn Marie Kirby”
Canyon Cinema presents the insufficient frame, the latest installment of its Canyon at The Roxie series celebrating Bay Area artists of past and present. The program includes films, videos, and live performance from the multifaceted work of long time Bay Area artist, filmmaker, and educator, Lynn Marie Kirby.
Kirby‘s work builds poetic vocabularies through moments drawn from daily life. Narratives are open-ended, built in collaboration and improvisation. Each work comes with its own set of materials investigations.
Today’s program highlights a selection of work from the 1980s to the present, including materialist explorations in celluloid film, improvisational analogue and digital video, and ephemeral multiple screen/ site embedded performative forms.
Following the presentation will be a conversation with Kirby and filmmaker and scholar Jeffrey Skoller, who has contributed to a new book on Kirby’s work published by X Artists’ Books: Time and Place: on the work of Lynn Marie Kirby. Jumping off from Skoller’s essay and the Roxie presentation, they will speak about the history and evolution of Kirby‘s work, and questions and ideas that are raised through her uniquely expanded approach to cinema.
The musician and composer Anne Hege, as well as singers will perform. The book will be available in the Roxie lobby before and after the presentation.
Screening Line-up:
Three Voices, 1984, 4 minutes, sound
Across the Street, 1982, 3 minutes, sound
Bathing, 1994, 5 minutes, sound (with live singer on stage and video on iPads in audience)
Sharon and the Birds on the Way to the Wedding, 1987, 22 minutes, sound
Love, Lynn, 1982, 1 minute, sound
Standardized Screen Tests, 2008, 11 minutes, sound
Latent Light: Golden Gate Bridge Exposure: Poised for Parabolas, 2004, 5 minutes, silent
Requiescat, 2006, 4 minutes, silent
Eulogy, 2025, 16 minutes, sound (with live voice over from stage)
Listen to the World Waking, 2021, 17 minutes, sound (with live singing in audience)
Approximate Running Time: 87 minutes
About Lynn Marie Kirby
Lynn Marie Kirby is an artist, filmmaker, and longtime Bay Are educator focused on questions of place, the residue of history, and social choreography. Her conceptual practice engages time as a material, different sensory systems, improvisation and collaboration, accidents that make her jump, and forms of contemplation. Her work has been shown around the world and supported by generous foundations, galleries and museums. Kirby is Professor Emerita in the Graduate Film and Fine Arts Programs at the California College of the Arts.
About Jeffrey Skoller
Jeffrey Skoller is a writer and filmmaker. In both scholarship and image-making, Skoller explores the radical aesthetics and praxis of the political avant-garde, representations of history and time, and contemporary cinematic hybrids such as the essay film, experimental documentary, animated documentary and expanded cinemas. Skoller’s films have been exhibited internationally. He is the author of Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film (University of Minnesota Press) and POSTWAR: The Films of Daniel Eisenberg (Blackdog Press). Skoller is Professor Emeritus in the Film & Media Dept. at UC Berkeley.
About Anne Hege
Born in Oakland, Anne Hege began her musical studies singing with the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir and the Oakland Youth Chorus. Hege received a BA in music with honors from Wesleyan University and an MA in music composition from Mills College. In 2014, she completed her PhD in Music Composition at Princeton University where she studied embodied cognition theory and musical meaning. She has composed for film, installation art, dance, and concert settings. Since 2008, Hege has composed musical scores for choreographer Carrie Ahern. The New York Times praised her score for Ahern’s SenSate as “convincing” and “strangely environmental.” Influenced by her deep listening practice, her latest compositions lie somewhere between ritual, music, and theater with some homemade instruments thrown in for good measure.
