LO_EATH

“I don’t believe in love because I’ve never seen it,” responds a young woman to an unseen interviewer in the first few minutes of the movie. This bleak portrait of loneliness and social exclusion is set on the edge of a desolate swamp where an aging clown and his daughter are struggling to survive. The location could be the end of the world, a place where hope has vanished along with a belief in the afterlife and the existence of God. The two unfortunates live together without the likelihood of change, as fear, aggression, and anger take hold of them – but they also experience sudden moments of tenderness.

A delusional young woman mourning the loss of her cat receives a visit from an unexpected visitor.

A psychiatrist and his patient discuss their relationship in a snow-covered field.

This exhibition focuses on Jonas Mekas’ 365 Day Project, a succession of films and videos in calendar form. Every day as of January 1st, 2007 and for an entire year, as indicated in the title, a large public (the artist's friends, as well as unknowns) were invited to view a diary of short films of various lengths (from one to twenty minutes) on the Internet. A movie was posted each day, adding to the previously posted pieces, resulting altogether in nearly thirty-eight hours of moving images.

Featuring a cast that includes Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, Mike Watt of the legendary hardcore band Minutemen, and Pettibon himself, this deadpan narrative pays dubious homage to the 1960's radical underground. In this crudely rendered home video of a commune of stoned revolutionaries, the cameras are hand-held, the edits in-camera, and the dialogue is wryly on-target. Pettibon's band of outsiders reenacts a countercultural moment defined by rock music, drugs, and ideological paradox — and in so doing, captures their own late-80's West Coast grunge milieu as well.

Through the uses of kinescope, video, multimedia, and direct painting on film, an impression is gained of the frantic action of protoplasm under a microscope where an imaginative viewer may see the genesis of it all. – Grove Press Film Catalog

Everyone has to be ready to appear before God, or it is irrevocably too late. My Lord. Save our guilty souls. Do not desert us. According to the short statement by the artist.

Moonwalker is a 1988 American experimental anthology musical film starring Michael Jackson. Rather than featuring one continuous narrative, the film expresses the influence of fandom and innocence through a collection of short films about Jackson, some of which are long-form music videos from Jackson's 1987 album Bad. The film is named after his famous dance, "the moonwalk", which he originally learned as "the backslide" but perfected the dance into something no one had seen before. The movie's introduction is a type of music video for Jackson's "Man in the Mirror" but is not the official video for the song. The film then expresses a montage of Michael's career, which leads into a parody of his Bad video titled "Badder", followed by sections "Speed Demon" and "Leave Me Alone". What follows is the biggest section where Michael plays a hero with magical powers and saves three children from Mr. Big. This section is "Smooth Criminal" which leads into a performance of "Come Together".

On the cold outskirts of town, something is about to happen. In our own way we are all waiting for something to happen.

Turquoise and maroon-toned thin lines of paint are interspersed with variously toned circular "watermarks" of blotched paint giving-way to multi-colored brush strokes and finally fulsomely darkened and thickened brush-strokes which then thin to something akin to the beginning.

Interplay of toned rectangular shapes, vertical and horizontal and diagonal lines in juxtaposition with hardened darker shapes which gradually shift tone and lighten until ending on thin blues.

Many white interruptive frames and absolutely straight-edged multi-colored lines amidst "clouds" of color, finally thickened into blobs with lengthy white (clear leader) spacing between them.

Much depth of multi-colored thickened shapes which appear to be superimposed upon each other, semi-transparent in their "weave" with each other which is increasingly interrupted by ragged-edged blobs and smears of color.

This section is very similar to Prelude 4 except that it is composed of extremely thin-lined colors and sharply delineated shapes which are constantly interrupted by "cloud"-like forms.

Interplay of mostly horizontal lines inter-woven with "watermark" forms in a wide variety of tones which gradually tend to dissolve into blues at the end.

The ocean, the trees, the varieties of cityscape and landscape assert themselves as "pictures", but the images are essentially a wash and tangle of nervous feedback, sometimes influenced by the colors of inlet waters, sometimes the wave movements, but more ordinarily by the cellular shifts and shapes of the optic system receiving exterior imagery.

...as removed as possible from any recognition of either exterior scene of interior feedback phenomena. It is, in its ineffability, as close to pure visual music as I can make it, more inspired by The Preludes of Bach or The Preludium of Buxtehude than anything of my surroundings when I was painting.

...again, is "plein-aire abstraction" as defined above (painted in New York City) – with, for example, even a correctly toned green impression of The Statue of Liberty – and, then, impressions of Toronto with its architectural particularities appearing, midst hurrying people – shapes (almost as if photographed at times). This segment is Double-Printed (i. e., two frames for every painted one).

Prelude 10 is a double-printed film with an extreme mixture of darks shot thru with jewel-like bursts of color, and very white bursts of light and fleeting colored forms.

Thick weaves of multicolored lines and dull-colored blobs play off against each other.