Saturday April 7, 8pm
Roger Beebe
Films for One to Eight Projectors
artist in person!
From “SOUNDFILM” (2015) by Roger Beebe – Image courtesy of Roger Beebe
We are pleased to welcome back to the gallery Columbus-based filmmaker Roger Beebe for an evening of films, videos, and multi-projector performances, including several New York premieres shown alongside some of his best-known works. The event is the New York leg of Beebe’s 3,000-mile East Coast tour, and the program has been adapted to include only works never before presented at the gallery.
In his works, Beebe often reflects upon forms of technology that are disappearing, or potentially being replaced – text fonts, books, moving image mediums, real estate – and critically considers their infrastructures and “replacements”, such as Amazon.com’s fulfillment centers in his 2018 “Amazonia” (NY Premiere) or the new high rises of Las Vegas, now the US city with the largest rate of suicide, in “Money Changes Everything” (2010).
Beebe’s 2015 performance work for six 16mm projectors “SOUNDFILM” presents a usually unseen history of sound and its recording, focusing on its visual translation on the film strip and measuring instruments, as sound to be seen on screen. His seven projector “Last Light of a Dying Star” (2008-2011), originally conceived for a planetarium, through meticulously juxtaposed original and found footage reveals how light, space, celluloid film, early space explorations, expanded cinema, and ephemerality are intertwined.
After the screening Beebe will be joined by Andrew Uroskie for a conversation and Q&A.
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Roger Beebe’s work since 2006 consists primarily of multiple projector performances that explore the world of found images and the “found” landscapes of late capitalism. He has screened his films around the globe at such unlikely venues as the CBS Jumbotron in Times Square and McMurdo Station in Antarctica as well as more likely ones including Sundance and the Museum of Modern Art with solo shows at Anthology Film Archives, The Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City, and Los Angeles Filmforum among many other venues. Beebe is also a film programmer: he ran Flicker, a festival of small-gauge film in Chapel Hill, NC, from 1997-2000 and was the founder and Artistic Director of FLEX, the Florida Experimental Film/Video Festival from 2004-2014. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Art at the Ohio State University.
General admission $8
Members & Students $6
Program:
SOUNDFILM
6 x 16mm, 2015, 16 minutes
A six-projector 16mm film performance, exploring the history of sound recording and the ways in which sound is represented as image. Composed primarily of fragments of 16mm educational films stretching from the 1940s through the 1980s, SOUNDFILM creates a complex visual and sonic space in which these fragments, starting with a compendium of elementary sound primers, coalesce around various key moments and strategies: representations of the vibrations of air particles, anatomical animations of the middle and inner ear, noise and hearing protection, and the technologies for representing sound (optical tracks, oscilloscopes, etc.). Simultaneously, however, the film explores and plays with a certain degree of abstraction that happens in these representations, at times liberating sound and image for their sensual qualities alone. In these sections it also references American minimalist composition with phase shifts and repetitions that recall the work of Steve Reich.
Amazonia (NY Premiere)
Super 8mm, 16mm, and HD video, 2018, 23 minutes
Amazonia is a live-narrated essayistic meditation on one of the key sites where the virtual world of e-commerce becomes physical: the Amazon.com fulfillment centers where the millions of items available for purchase with the click of a mouse await our orders. The film visits the four cities — New Castle, Delaware; Fernley, Nevada; Coffeyville, Kansas; and Campbellsville, Kentucky — where Amazon’s four original fulfillment centers were located to meditate on the impacts of our online purchases on the people and places “at the other end of the internet.”
Money Changes Everything
3 x 16mm, 2010, 5 minutes
Three days in Las Vegas, Nevada; three different visions of the discarded past and of the constantly renewed future. A three-part portrait of a town in transformation: a suburban utopia in the desert, a cancerous sprawl of unplanned development, a destination for suicides.
The Comic Sans Video (NY Premiere)
HD video, 2018, 8 minutes
A short live-narrated video essay on the most reviled font on Earth — and what’s behind that revulsion.
A Metaphor for the End of Just About Everything (NY Premiere)
cell phone HD video, 2016, 3 minutes
At one level, this is a document of the final hours of Long’s Book Store, a victim to both technological change (as books are ordered online or migrate to digital forms) and the pressures of real estate development (as a public-private partnership devours the blocks directly across from the Ohio State campus, nominally in the interest of establishing a new “Arts Corridor”). But the video is also a more general reflection on mortality and ephemerality, resonating with the billboard image of Félix González-Torres’s Untitled (for Parkett), which was also destroyed with the building. Perhaps paradoxically though, the video also represents and embodies the digital afterlife of those physical artifacts that disappear daily, preserving in electronic amber — for now, at least — these traces of what once was.
Last Light of a Dying Star
6 x 16mm, 1 x super 8mm, 2008/rev. 2011, 26 minutes
A multi-projector meditation on the mysteries of space. Originally made for an installation/performance in a planetarium at the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Macon, GA, the film attempts to recapture some of the excitement of the early days of space exploration and the utopian aspirations of expanded cinema. Made as an orchestration of a number of different elements, both original and found: handmade cameraless film loops by Beebe and Jodie Mack; 16mm educational films about eclipses, asteroids, comets, and meteorites; and a super 8 print of the East German animated film “The Drunk Sun.”
Image courtesy of Roger Beebe
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Microscope Gallery Event Series 2018 is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).
