Sunday, March 19, 2017 at 7pm
Carbon Life
Bridget Donahue, 99 Bowery, 2nd Floor, New York
Curated by Mary Helena Clark
Likeness (Prologue: Remnant Branch), Michael Guidetti, 2017, digital projection, 6 mins
JACKSHOES, Dana Michel, 2011, digital projection, 6 mins
Elegy, Joe Gibbons, 1991, digital projection, 11 mins
Portrait of Evan Parker (Silver/Gold), Neil Henderson, 2010, digital projection, 11 mins
Mobile Men, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2008, digital projection, 4 mins
When I Was a Monster, Anne McGuire, 1996, digital projection, 6 mins
Delphi Falls (excerpt), Mary Helena Clark, 2017, digital projection, 9 mins
Lightning, Paul and Marlene Kos, 1975, digital projection, 2 mins
“I think human beings are still full of tenderness. They aren’t full of stones but they need to be reminded that they are becoming stones. Crying is a way for people to rediscover their tenderness. In my films I always film people drinking water. After drinking, they piss or cry. Our bodies are like containers. They hold material things like water but also desire and feelings, and power too. ” - Tsai Ming-liang
“And how can you love people if you don’t love water, stone, glass?” - Jonas Mekas
Carbon Life serves as a continuation of ideas that influenced my recent film Delphi Falls. Included in the program as an excerpt, Delphi Falls tracks multiple subjectivities in order to test the line between self and other, person and object. The collection of videos I’ve chosen to accompany it likewise considers the relationships between sentience and its physical boundaries.
In Michael Guidetti’s Likeness (Prologue: Remnant Branch), cubic forms in the non-space of a 3D modeling program ratchet up and down, back and forth, with the instincts of an insect flipped on its back, or the force of magnets. Under waves of synth, disembodied voices speak: They have mouths but they speak not. Eyes, have they, but they see not. Dancer and choreographer Dana Michel’s camera eyes her shoes and a pair of yellow underwear crumpled on the floor as she intones lines from My House. Her voice, a byproduct of the body, modulates.
Joe Gibbons plays Joe Gibbons in Elegy, while the Pixelvision camera approximates his dog Woody’s point of view. Gibbons says through gritted teeth: “I want to be a leaf. I want to fall from a great height and crush whatever I land on.” Neil Henderson’s Portrait of Evan Parker (Silver/Gold) explores Parker’s musical technique and the effect it has on his soprano saxophone. Breath and light enter the instrument; extraordinary sound and drops of spit come out.
Speeding down a road in the back of a truck, two migrant workers pass a camera back and forth, flexing and declaring themselves as present in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Mobile Men. One man mics his inked skin and screams. In When I Was a Monster, Anne McGuire’s moves are animatronic, her body othered by an accident. She plays herself as a marionette with the camera as mirror.
When I look for the lightning, it never strikes. When I look away, it does. Marlene and Paul Kos’ Lightning toys with control and chance, the act of looking as a gesture of meaning and incident, what we see and don’t in the phenomenal world.
- MHC
FREE
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Doors opens at 6:30pm
Bridget Donahue will be hosting this year's Light Industry benefit on Tuesday, March 21.