From: Thomas Beard (email suppressed)
Date: Sat Feb 21 2009 - 11:07:25 PST
Light Industry
http://www.lightindustry.org
Jennet Thomas and Jim Trainor: Natural Selections
Tuesday, February 24, 2009 at 7:30pm
220 36th Street, 5th Floor NEW SPACE
Brooklyn, New York
A double bill of philosophical humor and strange science, the cute and the
brute.
Emerging from London's anarchistic underground film and live art club scene
in the 90s, where she was a co-founder of the fabled Exploding Cinema
Collective, Jennet Thomas's work began as spoken performance with
projections, and developed into an innovative hybrid of film languages. Her
videos recall weird childrenıs programming, low-rent 70s sci-fi TV, and
Britainıs vaudeville-like music hall traditions; rainbow-hued set designs
and idiosyncratic uses of sound collide with a surprising amalgam of genres.
"I like to explore unlikely methods of sense-making,² she says. ³My
narratives are often generated via dream-logic and increasingly experimental
methodologies, inspired by odd corners of British culture, our relationship
with science, despair at the way the world goes, and the problems of
'truth.'² In Because of the War, a dapper Yellow Man Lecturer looks the
viewer squarely in the eye and delivers an account of how it all came to
pass: the conflict, the changes, everyday acts of transubstantiation,
leading to a world where magick and ritual are suburban norms. Return of the
Black Tower provides an elliptical response to John Smithıs 1987 film The
Black Tower, and The Man who went Outside features performance artist
Richard Layzell, trapped in an ever changing color-void, locked in a power
play with a perversely operated camera.
Drawn in fat, inky lines with black sharpies on plain paper, Jim Trainorıs
animations explore the inner lives of animals who appear strangely
self-aware even as they instinctually copulate, feed, fight, kill and die.
Sometimes his characters are humans, likewise acting under animal impulses,
who nonetheless passively recount mental inventories of their own
organism-driven actions. The Magic Kingdom intersperses footage of creatures
in artificial zoo landscapes with what may be animated diagrams of their
souls, while Harmony presents ten vignettes of animals and people wracked
with guilt over broken taboos. A video documentary that continues Trainorıs
trademark morbid humor, The Skulls, and the Skulls and the Bones, and the
Bones visits with an amateur taxidermist who lives with his creepy
collection in a tiny apartment. The Presentation Theme, Trainor's latest
work, involves a mammal-headed snake, a Peruvian prisoner, and a
blood-hungry priestess.
The Man Who Went Outside, Jennet Thomas, video, 2008, 10 mins
Return of the Black Tower, Jennet Thomas, video, 2007, 15 mins
Because of the War, Jennet Thomas, video, 2005, 14 mins
The Magic Kingdom, Jim Trainor, 16mm, 2002, 7 mins
The Skulls, and the Skulls and the Bones, and the Bones, Jim Trainor, video,
2003, 13 mins
Harmony, Jim Trainor, 16mm, 2005, 13 mins
The Presentation Theme, Jim Trainor, 16mm, 2008, 14 mins
Followed by a conversation between Thomas and Trainor.
Tickets - $7, available at door.
About Jennet Thomas and Jim Trainor
Jennet Thomas has screened regularly over the international film festival
and microcinema arena in Europe and the US for the past decade. More
recently her work has been appearing in the form of video installations in
galleries, with her first solo London exhibition at PEER Gallery in 2007 and
a forthcoming show at Mattıs Gallery, London. Her work is represented
internationally by Video Data Bank. She teaches at Art School and is Pathway
Leader of BA Fine Art: Time Based Media at the University of the Arts,
London. She also makes paintings, drawings and objects and lives in Nunhead,
South London with filmmaker Paul Tarragó and Olive the cat.
Jim Trainor (b. 1961) has been making animated films since he was thirteen.
In that time his medium has changed little - his preferred technique is
black magic marker on typing paper. He grew up in Washington DC, and lived
in New York City in his 20s and 30s. The Fetishist (1997), a portrait of a
serial killer, took him eleven years to make and is highly unpleasant,
though perhaps not in the way you might expect. A series of films about
animals - The Bats, The Moschops, The Magic Kingdom and Harmony - followed,
and have been widely screened, sometimes under the collective title The
Animals and Their Limitations. The third-mentioned was in the 2004 Whitney
Biennial in New York. In 2000 Mr. Trainor got a teaching job at The School
of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is now lodged happily. He is
currently at work on a new series of films, Nascent Humanity, of which The
Presentation Theme has just been completed (2008), to be followed by a long,
meandering, as yet untitled film about the sun-and moon-myths of a
headhunting culture. Beyond filmmaking, his passions include looking closely
at birds and insects and reading forgotten anthropology books of the 1920s.
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 has
begun as a series of events at Industry City in Sunset Park, 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 an ongoing dialogue amongst a wide range of
artists and audiences within the city.
About Industry City
Industry City, an industrial complex in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, is home to a
cross-section of manufacturing, warehousing and light industry. As part of a
regeneration program intended to diversify the use of its 6 million square
feet of space to better reflect 21st century production, Industry City now
includes workspace for artists. In addition to offering studios at
competitive rates, Industry City also provides a limited number of low-cost
studios for artists in financial need. This program was conceived in
response to the lack of affordable workspace for artists in New York City
and aims to establish a new paradigm for industrial redevelopment--one that
does not displace artists, workers, local residents or industry but instead
builds a sustainable community in a context that integrates cultural and
industrial production.
For more information, please visit http://www.industrycityartproject.org
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For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.