From: Thomas Beard (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Mar 24 2008 - 06:26:18 PDT
Light Industry
The Blazing World
Curated by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter
Tuesday, March 25, 2008 at 8pm
55 33rd Street, 3rd Floor
Brooklyn, NY
www.lightindustry.org
"A map of the world that does not include utopia is not worth even glancing
at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing."
- Oscar Wilde
30/73: Coop Cinema Amsterdam, Kurt Kren, 16mm, 1973, 3 mins
Swamp, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, 16mm, 1971, 6 mins
Victory Over the Sun, Michael Robinson, 16mm, 2007, 12 mins
Possible Models, Jenny Perlin, 16mm, 2004, 11 mins
Wildwood Flower, Keewatin Dewdney, 16mm, 1971, 4 mins
Berenice, Michael Gitlin, 16mm, 1996, 51 mins
Light Industry's inaugural event brings together a group of films that
ponder the vicissitudes of utopian scheming and the search for new ground.
Juxtaposing the heady, exploratory optimism of the Aquarian age with the
more sobering observations of contemporary artists, The Blazing World
attempts to embrace the complexities inherent in what Light Industry sets
forth to support: the ongoing social experiment in community that undergirds
moving-image art-making.
Beginning on a reflexive note, Kurt Kren's rarity Coop Cinema Amsterdam
documents three weeks in the life of the legendary Dutch venue The Electric
Cinema, condensed into a frantic hallucination through single-frame
shooting. In Swamp, artist Nancy Holt attempts to navigate her way through a
grassy, muddy stretch of New Jersey wetlands, guided only by the sights of
her Bolex and Robert Smithson's verbal cues. Michael Robinson's Victory Over
the Sun revisits the abandoned sites of World's Fairs in the service of
subtle, sci-fi psychedelia, while Jenny Perlin's hand-drawn film Possible
Models compares the communitarian dreams of Victor Gruen, architect of the
first shopping mall, with his hypercapitalist spawn: the Mall of America,
Dubailand, and the "Freedom Ship," a proposed libertarian
tax-shelter-of-the-seas. Back on dry land, Keewatin Dewdney's Wildwood
Flower offers up a folk-crafted vision of bucolic innocence that could only
have emerged from 1971.
Anchoring the lineup, Michael Gitlin's Berenice provides a richly
psychological costumer set during the decay of an upstate New York utopian
community in the 1830s. Partially adapted from the Edgar Allen Poe tale of
the same name, blended with texts on phalansterist socialism by Charles
Fourier and letters from the Transcendentalist commune Brook Farm, Berenice
wends a tale of an old, weird America in search of new social harmonies
through visionary ideals.
Ticket Price - $6
email suppressed
About Light Industry
Light Industry is a new venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn, New
York. Developed and overseen by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, the project will
begin as a series of weekly events at Industry City in Sunset Park this
spring and summer, each organized by a different artist, critic, or curator.
Conceptually, Light Industry draws equal inspiration from the long history
of alternative art spaces in New York as well its storied tradition of
cinematheques and other intrepid film exhibitors. Through a regular program
of screenings, performances, and lectures, its goal is to explore new models
for the presentation of time-based media and foster a complex dialogue
amongst a wide range of artists and audiences within the city.
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For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.