Through the course of the 1980s, Canadian artist-filmmaker Richard Kerr had gradually moved towards an ‘accelerated cinema,’ an imagistic cinema of movement, montage and aggressive sound design. Kerr’s work in this ‘accelerated cinema’ became increasingly total at the same time that he became invested in the model of the ‘teacher-practitioner,’ collaborating directly with his students and working with simple, accessible tools.
Canadian artist-filmmaker Richard Kerr was raised in a north-south family near the American border. From a young age he was preoccupied with the vision of empire reflected in American mass culture and sport. As he matured as a filmmaker, Kerr began to turn his attention increasingly to America as a subject, undertaking road trips through the American southwest, studying the spirit of a landscape made for cinema.
As part of the screening series IN SITU, la lumière collective in collaboration with Double Negative Collective presents : ERIN WEISGERBER & RICHARD KERR
Richard Kerr’s reflection on his travels and the materiality of his photographs with Erin Weisgerber’s abstracted portraits of people and places dear to her, together reveal two different sides of the poetic essay and embodied cinema.
Richard Kerr is a visual artist-media maker known for his expansive body of work, which has explored a multiplicity of genres and mediums since the 1970’s. In the 1990’s Richard expanded his practice to encompass meta-cinema installation work and most notably the conceptualization of the Motion Picture Weaving Project. Richard is a teacher/artist, as such his studio informs his teaching and his teaching inspires his studio work.
Dates:
Sunday, March 31, 2019 - 19:00 to Monday, April 1, 2019 - 18:55
VISIONS in collaboration with the Festival du nouveau cinéma presents : Richard Kerr + Michaela Grill + Emmanuel Lefrant (16mm, 35mm, 60mins)
Shot in the deserts of the American Southwest, Kerr’s The Last Days of Contrition (1988) is a poetic, harrowing vision of the apocalyptic consequences of militarism and the bankruptcy of the American ideal. The film is set after the fall. Disembodied voices prophesize and attest over a swirling ménage of unsettling desert landscapes, weaponry and dystopian nationalist symbolism. Richard Kerr’s film is followed by shorts by Emmanuel Lefrant (France) and Michaela Grill (Austria). Lefrant’s film work is based on abstraction being apprehended as landscape — a landscape that is the actor or producer of emotions and subjective experiences. The films are based on the idea of representing or revealing an invisible world, a nature that one does not see, through the secret forms of the emulsion. Grill builds her work via the digital format, which she considers the most radical form for rethinking the film image. Her videos, a skillful synergy between image and sound, address the question of cinematic perception and its reduction into abstract forms.
Dates:
Sunday, October 11, 2015 - 19:00 to Monday, October 12, 2015 - 18:55
Sight Unseen is honored to have Filipe Afonso, Curator with Collectif Jeune Cinéma, to present a collection of works from CJC. Founded in 1971, Collectif Jeune Cinéma promotes experimental moving image work including the distribution of experimental cinema, regular monthly screenings and the yearly Different and Experimental Cinema Festival of Paris (FCDEP). CJC’s catalogue includes more than 1,300 films from more than 350 filmmakers.
The emotional, physical and aesthetic value of a sound is linked not only to the causal explanation we attribute to it but also to its own qualities of timbre and texture, to its own personal vibration. So just as directors and cinematographers (even those who will never make abstract films) have everything to gain by refining their knowledge of visual materials and textures, we can similarly benefit from disciplined attention to the inherent qualities of sounds. – Michel Chion, The Three Listening Modes, The Sound Studies Reader, 2012
Dates:
Friday, November 21, 2014 - 21:00 to Saturday, November 22, 2014 - 20:55
