Dust Narrative

Los Angeles-based artist Ed Ruscha’s 1975 short film Miracle centers on a day in the life of an auto mechanic (played by artist Jim Ganzer), who has a transformative experience while working on the engine of a Ford Mustang. Actress and singer Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas plays his love interest. Since the 1960s, Ruscha has received extensive critical acclaim for his paintings, photographs, drawings, and books exploring the commercial vernacular of Los Angeles—its graphic signage, architecture, and even parking lots. In effect, his work subtly comments on America’s cultural and socioeconomic evolution in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Miracle is one of only two films made by the artist in the 1970s. – Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by Kelly Shindler, Associate Curator

Melbhattan. Melbhattan is part homage, part pastiche of the opening sequence of Woody Allen's seminal 1979 film Manhattan. Melbhattan features more than sixty black and white tableaux of Melbourne each composed to mimic images in Allen's film.

Artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss create the ultimate Rube Goldberg machine. The pair used found objects to construct a complex, interdependent contraption in an empty warehouse. When set in motion, a domino-like chain reaction ripples through the complex of imaginative devices. Fire, water, the laws of gravity, and chemistry determine the life-cycle of the objects. The process reveals a story concerning cause and effect, mechanism and art, and improbability and precision, in an extended science project that will mesmerize the mind.

Tribute to director, screenwriter and actress Sarah Polley. A whimsical, playful film tells the story of the kinds of stories Polley tells, using humorous, simple line animation, the film comments on the messiness of life and art.

Short experimental film by Nan Wang

Each pixel is separated like an exploded screen, set in a chaotic way into the space. The video has a whole movement in the room, as one three dimensional image. The experience resembles the brain, working with electromagnetic waves and low voltage information.

An experimental media installation of three windows exploring fragments of liminality. Three unique re-constructions of experiential instances volumising the cataclysms of thresholds. Experience the absence of definition, the absence of boundaries set and the absence of rationale. A myth is not to be understood, a myth is passed on, like a game of Chinese whispers, it takes its course and ages with time, suiting the demography and tale, it warps and distorts

During the 1980 exhibition of Burden's monumental kinetic sculpture The Big Wheel at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, Burden and Feldman were interviewed by art critic Willoughby Sharp. Burden articulates the process of creating The Big Wheel, a 6,000-pound, spinning cast-iron flywheel that is initially powered by a motorcycle, and discusses its relation to his earlier performance pieces and sculptural works. Addressing his motivations and the meaning of this potentially dangerous mechanical art object, Burden discusses such topics as the role of the artist in the industrial world, "personal insanity and mass insanity," and "man's propensity towards violence."

An installation containing video files of the artist's persona, alongside a karaoke piece of her as she watches her viewership fall and two mirrors side by side of messages she received, from two different users online.

Documentarian Richard Lavoie follows the artists of the Mer Océane symposium which took place on La Grave, in the Magdalen Islands, in 1998.

The band of American artists known as the New York School toyed with tradition and rebelled against the Renaissance.Feeling as though free association yielded their best results, the painters, poets and performers of the New York School took a surrealist approach that was concerned less with aesthetic and more with expression. Those associated with the School were unified by their desire to create from within. They created a monumental, dramatic art that remains a singular expression of the crucial modern quest for individuality and personal freedom." Never knowing exactly how their pieces would turn out, the artists of the New York School embraced their own complex humanity and worked from a place of bold, sporadic realness.

15 x 15 x 5 (minisalon 1984)

Jeu de mémoire

Shot in Sweden, the short film, ‘LAGOM: Breaking Bread With The Self-Righteous’ sees an appearance by Lhola Amira. She does not perform, she just appears. She looks a little lost in a field of flowers in bloom, a vista of beauty, yellow everywhere; she does not pluck a single flower. ‘LAGOM’ is the Swedish ethos of “not too much, not too little – just the appropriate amount.”

A loner artist with a history of abuse meets a beautiful woman who takes an interest in his life and work; leading to a chilling path of tragedy.

Aerial views of Canada as you travel from east to west

superposition is a project about the way we understand the reality of nature on an atomic scale and is inspired by the mathematical notions of quantum mechanics. Performers will appear in Ikeda’s work for the first time, performing as operator/conductor/observer/examiners. All the components on stage will be in a state of superposition; sound, visuals, physical phenomena, mathematical concepts, human behaviour and randomness – these will be constantly orchestrated and de-orchestrated simultaneously in a single performance piece.

Nine artisans on secluded Gabriola Island reveal the differences between mass manufactured and authentic locally handmade through intimate portraits of their work and lifestyle.

This cabinet of curiosities is a product of the exchange of ideas with the artist Ricardo González . We talked about how the cymatics and patterns that nature produces have an echo in artisanal production in Masaya, Nicaragua. Visits to various museums in Paris gave further support to these observations. This video installation condenses that meeting of ideas.

CREMASTER 3 (2002) is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character - host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find form in the struggle between Hiram Abiff or the Architect ...