Saturday June 16, 7:30pm
Double Halves
Double projection film works by Josh Guilford & Andrew Ranville, Sarah Halpern, Bruce McClure, Lívia Sá, Audra Wolowiec
Artists in person
Bruce McClure, sketch for “Head of the Wake” (2018) – Image courtesy of the artist
“Single barreled names for double paralleled twixty twins. Step up to another charge of a light barricade; double focus. A runabout to match it. Sing a ring. How is this at all? Searchers for tabernacles and the celluloid art!” – Bruce McClure, 2018
Microscope presents an evening of new and recent double projection works for 16mm film and 35mm film slides by Josh Guilford & Andrew Ranville, Sarah Halpern, Bruce McClure, Lívia Sá, and Audra Wolowiec.
The varied works in “Double Halves” utilize two projections to form a whole – although not literally – with each side complementing the other or serving as a part of a single narrative, visual composition, or projection apparatus. Some of the works are projected with a prerecorded soundtrack, others include more performative elements and/or a live sound accompaniment.
In contemplating the works by the five artists, we have tumbled deep into the rabbit hole where we are now asking ourselves whether double projection is the more logical presentation of a medium in which it could be argued that duality is ever present. The celluloid film itself has a head and a tail; the projection (usually) requires two reels, feed and take up; in theaters films are loaded on and projected from two projectors to avoid downtime for reel changes; etc. Is double projection two projections or one divided in half?
Artists will be attendance and available for Q&A following the program.
General admission $10
Members or students w/ ID $8
Program:
( )
by Audra Wolowiec
2 x slide projections, 98 slides (inkjet prints on paper with Sea 006, a scented oil made in collaboration with Tara Pelletier), 2015, approx. 10 minutes
First performed at the Poetry Project at St. Marks Church, ( ) is a language-based short film composed on two slide projectors. Held by punctuation and fragments of an unfolding narrative, signals sequence from left to right. The projections communicate through call and response, buoyantly searching, locating each other and the audience in a shared space of reading.
Head of the Wake
by Bruce McClure
16mm film performance, sound, 2018, duration variable
“Elisha beacon, beckon bright! This bumper sticker is used to boast aloud and alone to itself. Follow it up with end speaking; the briefest glimpse of glad rags through whose slit spills unmeshed waves to yonder time where flash becomes word and silents self round. A double joined morning, they deliver chalking on walls with a little lamp belt chorus. Every line’s end a head strength pass through the eye of “for instance.” Constructor and lexical student corrected with the black. After glow of a shower proof wall, the doorplate a blind of black sailcloth over show and show to the server of servants looping the lamp! Seated with such flop right down determination reminds us of twice importunate towns of X, Y and Z. The inventions that led to optical sound-on-film technology employ the use of an electric lamp, called an exciter, shining through a translucent waveform printed on the edge of a film strip. When the light shines through the film, it is read by a photo-sensitive material and fed through a processor that converts the photovoltaic impulse into an electrical signal that is then amplified and converted into analogue sound waves through a speaker. Captured by wanamade sing signs to sound sense enjoined flashily by disordered visage. Single barreled names for double paralleled twixty twins. Step up to another charge of a light barricade; double focus. A runabout to match it. Sing a ring. How is this at all? Searchers for tabernacles and the celluloid art! Certainly it has only one square step, to be steady. My own doubled with love and single biased hate, settled and stratified in the capital city. Double quick turned out to remove their origins, opened it closed. Hot and cold and electricity with attendance and lounge and promenade to scrape your souls. Commit no.” – Bruce McClure, June 9, 2018
-+=Oo.
by Lívia Sá
2 x 16mm film, 2014, 4 minutes 33 seconds
“Minus plus equals the integration of different shapes, which transform themselves while becoming one and many. This is a hand made 16mm dual projection that explores the negative and positive spaces as well as the reuse of residual film material, which eventually turn into underwater particles.” – LS
White Fang, Black Tooth
by Sarah Halpern, w/ live score by Judith Berkson and Matt Wellins
Performance for 16mm film and overhead projections, sound, 2018, approx. 15 minutes
The title refers to the giant dog characters from the Soupy Sales show, who only ever appear as huge arms, with suggested bodies out of frame, grunting, gesticulating and sometimes throwing pie. This piece deals with the influence of the world outside of one’s immediate vista. With the increasing presence of screens, what part of our daily experience might be considered ‘in’ or ‘out’ of frame?
Circumambulations (Linear)
by Andrew Ranville, Josh Guilford, w/ sound by Roarke Menzies
2 x 16mm film, sound, 2017, 15 minutes
Circumambulations (Linear) is a theatrical version of a modular work conceived for multiple exhibition spaces. The theatrical version consists of two rolls of 16mm film projected side-by-side and repeated five times. Each film was shot on Rabbit Island, a remote 91-acre wilderness located in Lake Superior. Mapping the circumference of the island (9,504 ft.) to the length of a 16mm camera roll (4000 frames), Ranville and Guilford walked the island’s coast in opposite directions on subsequent days, exposing a single frame of film roughly every 2.376 feet. When projected side-by-side, the resulting films combine to form an alternative representation of the island, collapsing its dense interior and evoking a shifting land mass defined by a constantly fluctuating border of water and stone. Working entirely with field recordings taken by Ranville and Guilford to create the film’s score, Menzies looped, overlaid, and played back selections of the recordings at different speeds, altering and re-recording these selections in his Brooklyn studio to poetically retrace the filmmakers’ steps through time, equipment, and multiple material transfers.
From “( )” by Audra Wolowiec, double slide projection, 2015, 10 minutes – Image courtesy of the artist
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Judith Berkson is a soprano, pianist and composer living in Brooklyn, New York. She studied voice with Lucy Shelton and composition with Joe Maneri at the New England Conservatory. She has collaborated with Kronos Quartet, Wet Ink, Yarn/Wire and City Opera and has presented work at Picasso Museum Malaga, Roulette, Le Poisson Rouge, Joe’s Pub, The Stone, Barbès and the 92 Street Y. She has received a Six Points Fellowship, a Jerome Foundation grant, Meet The Composer grant and support from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her solo album “Oylam” (ECM Records) was called “Standards and Schubert and liturgical music, swing and chilly silences, a beautiful Satie-like piece to open and close the record” by Ben Ratliff of the New York Times.
Josh Guilford is a filmmaker, programmer, and scholar based between Western Massachusetts and New York. He holds a Ph.D. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University, and serves as Visiting Assistant Professor of English in Film and Media Studies at Amherst College. His films, essays, and curatorial programs have appeared in a variety of festivals, publications, and venues.
Bruce McClure graduated from architectural school in 1985. His projector performances have been included in many national and international events including among others the Whitney Biennial, Centre Georges Pompidou Paris, France, International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and Image Forum, Toyko, Japan. Drawing on the experience of Harold Edgerton’s stroboscopic flash and the flicker films of recent decades, McClure applies his formal training as an architect to construct mind-altering, multi-projector works of light and obstruction accompanied by optical sound. In early 2016, McClure’s work will be object of an exhibition at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in connection with a series of performances taking place at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.
Roarke Menzies is a New York City-based artist and composer who creates electronic and electroacoustic works. His music has been described by The New Yorker as “a layered electronic throb, coming and going, always enhancing but never overpowering.” Preforming widely, he recently presented work at Untitled Art Fair in Miami in November of 2016 and was profiled in Musicworks Magazine.
Sarah Halpern works with film, paper, sound and performance. She has exhibited her artwork and performed at venues including Anthology Film Archives, The Kitchen, Experimental Intermedia, Microscope Gallery, and NYFF’s Views from the Avant Garde among others. She has collaborated extensively with electronic musician and composer Matt Wellins as well as expanded cinema performance group Optipus. Halpern was born in Washington DC and lives and works in Queens, New York. She received a BA in Film and Electronic Arts from Bard College. She received a MacDowell Colony Residency Fellowship in 2014.
Andrew Ranville is an interdisciplinary artist who works nomadically. Previously based in London, United Kingdom from 2006-2015, Ranville received his MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2008. He recently represented the United States at the 5th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art in June of 2016. He is a Fellow of the TBA21 Academy and the Royal Geographical Society.
Lívia Sá is a multimedia artist, originally from São Paulo, Brazil. At the age of 18 Lívia moved to San Francisco to study Cinema Production and worked with a variety of independent filmmakers and photographers. She is currently based in Brooklyn and just finished her masters degree in Media Studies at The New School. Livia’s personal work range from human rights issues to experimental narratives by using both documentary and experimental filmmaking. Often times, her work goes beyond conventional approaches to cinema as she is interested in altering the viewer’s perception while stimulating different senses in her storytelling.
Matt Wellins (b. 1983) is a musician from Pittsburgh, PA. His work is largely based in analog circuitry, the snafus of live performance, and a general ambivalence toward commercial equipment. His current interests are in the private loft theater of 1970s New York, cybernetic music systems, and the ZBS Artist-in-Residency program. He has released music on What the…? Records and presented work at Anthology Film Archives and EMPAC. Along with Michael Johnsen, he maintains the Electronic Music Resource at Ubu.com.
Audra Wolowiec is an interdisciplinary artist whose work oscillates between sculpture, installation, text and performance with an emphasis on sound and the material qualities of language. Her work has been shown internationally and in the United States at MASS MoCA, CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Art in General, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Studio 10, The Poetry Project, and the Center for Performance Research. Features have included BOMB, Modern Painters, The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, CAA Journal, Sound American, and reductive journal. Residencies include Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Complex Systems Art and Physics Residency at the University of Oregon, supported by a National Science Foundation Grant, and Dieu Donné. She currently teaches at Parsons School of Design, SUNY Purchase, and Dia:Beacon.
From “Circumambulations (Linear)” by Andrew Ranville, Josh Guilford, w/ Sound by Roarke Menzies, 2017, 15 minutes – Image courtesy of the artists
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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).
