Tuesday, December 12, 2017 at 7:30pm
A Sleeping World
155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn
Presented by Joshua Gen Solondz
To close out 2017, Light Industry has invited artist and musician Joshua Gen Solondz to program a selection of his own films and videos alongside works he’s chosen by others. Deploying a wide range of approaches—performance recordings, found-footage manipulations, kaleidoscopic abstractions, and variations on the flicker film—Solondz’s work offers an exhilarating model for how an aesthetic predicated on audio-visual media’s material properties might evolve into the 21st century, expanding upon the legacies of artists like the Vasulkas, Paul Sharits, and Lis Rhodes. To this end, Solondz has embraced the use of disruptions and breakdowns, mixing an array of analog and digital formats to explore the psychotropic possibilities of noise and mechanical error. But by pairing his own projects with those of his mentors and contemporaries, Solondz draws out themes in his work that go beyond the visceral effects he’s become known for: questions of politics, race, transnationalism, and the paranormal.
Behold the Asian, James T. Hong, 1999, 16mm, 15 mins
Babash, Behrouz Rae and Lisa Truttmann, 2014, digital projection, 9 mins
BURNING STAR, Joshua Gen Solondz, 2011, digital projection, 4 mins
Sounding Glass, Sylvia Schedelbauer, 2011, digital projection, 10 mins
It’s not a prison if you never try the door, Joshua Gen Solondz, 2014, digital projection, 7 mins
Musical Break / Intermission, Synth-Humpers
From Alex to Alex, Alison S.M. Kobayashi, 2006, digital projection, 6 mins
AGAINST LANDSCAPE, Joshua Gen Solondz, 2013, digital projection, 4 mins
2 Spellbound, Les LeVeque, 1999, digital projection, 8 mins
PRISONER’S CINEMA, Joshua Gen Solondz, 2012, digital projection, 10 mins
Woman Falling, Luther Price, 1990, Super-8, 3 mins
LUNA E SANTUR, Joshua Gen Solondz, 2016, digital projection, 10 mins
“Do you want to be part of a world of sleeping people? Do you want to imbibe the drug of the commonplace? Will you be forever addicted to self-restriction?” - Thee Grey Book
I’m investigating the struggle to see/perceive/understand/remember/comprehend, a struggle that may manifest as an experiential blast or as a shambling trauma striving to resurface, wearing the skin of a medium. These works tap into this to varying degrees. I’m not very good nor interested in communicating directly. I like shaggy dogs.
James T. Hong’s Behold the Asian is the tonic here, to borrow a musical term. He wrote saying that he’s relieved to not be showing in an Asian-American-themed program. It’s the first film of his I’d seen, back in 2010. In preparation for this program I’d also requested another film—Taipei 101—but James said that racial tensions are too high in the United States right now to show it here.
Behrouz Rae and Lisa Truttmann’s Babash features a parrot, and muses on the question of being understood. I’m also fond of parrots, having grown up with a Green Amazonian. Babash the parrot speaks Farsi and lives in eastern Los Angeles. He belonged to Behrouz’s grandmother, but she died shortly after the video was finished, so Babash lives with Behrouz now. Lisa Truttmann lives in Vienna and I’m sorry I misspelled her name in the credits for AGAINST LANDSCAPE.
BURNING STAR takes its title from Kenji Onishii’s A Burning Star, which I saw at Light Industry back in 2010. It was a good year. BURNING STAR was made at the now-defunct Experimental Television Center in Owego, New York. I dedicated it to my father, who is still alive but requested I make something with more color.
Sounding Glass deals, like much of Sylvia’s work, with the repressed/suppressed trauma of personal/public history and of intra-nationality/nationalism. It’s also an elegant film about space and rhythm. She visited Los Angeles while I was making LUNA E SANTUR and our conversations helped me work through some of my troubles at the time.
It’s not a prison if you never try the door was commissioned by Leo Goldsmith and Rachael Rakes for ZERO LAND, a show about nuclear catastrophe that they erected at Heliopolis Gallery. I told LG and RR I didn’t want to do something playing off of my Japanese heritage but then I did it anyways. They presented the entirety of Peter Watkins’s The Journey and would screen my little video during breaks.
Alison S.M. Kobayashi’s From Alex to Alex goes in a more playful direction. She has a skill in uncovering a latent history in objects, rescuing them from banality by infusing them with life. This life is fueled by a great deal of research, rigor, and care for her subjects.
AGAINST LANDSCAPE was a reactionary video performance I made after moving to Los Angeles. I hadn’t done anything figurative in a while and wanted to do something immediately.
2 Spellbound is the first work of Les LeVeque’s that I ever saw. His work has been deeply influential to my own; I’m glad to have been his student. His lessons on political artmaking and the joys of analog video remain with me. This is a video that is also a Rorschach test that is also a music video that is also a condensed response to Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Spellbound.
PRISONER’S CINEMA is dedicated to my mother and inspired by the paintings of Bridget Riley and Julian Stanczak, as well as Brion Gysin’s Dreammachine. Two more correspondences: Pawel Wojtasik got me into Zen meditation, Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis. I’d been reading up on neurology and came across the phenomenon of the prisoner's cinema.
Luther Price is sharing a very rare early Super-8 film titled Woman Falling. He suggested it specifically for this program. His work is consistently very personal, intense, a little frightening, and inevitably beautiful. He says it best: “This is no longer a mans world ... This is the Dawn of the planet of the woman .. And woman falling.”
LUNA E SANTUR is a recent film, finished on 35mm. It’s dedicated to my mother Yuriko and my wife Emma. It owes a debt to Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn’s Deadman, Michael Smith’s Secret Horror, Magritte’s Lovers, and a paranormal encounter I had in 2015.
- JGS
Tickets - $8, available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm.