Fall 2006 - Future Past

Photographs, films, videos and DVDs all contribute to the spatialized dimensions of an ever-expanding present.  Many of the people, places and events that we see in these images no longer exist, yet they potentially endure into the future as traces within image dataspace and as mute artifacts of an incomplete historical context.  The artists in Future Past explore archaeological aspects of these subjects and experiences and create varieties of non-linear works where different phases or conditions of time become material, and future, present and past co-exist along with sound and image in layered simultaneous dimensions. 

Bill Morrison's films present a unique material index of cinematic time through his interactions with self-generating, eruptive presences of the deteriorating emulsions of film footage that he has collected from various archives.  Films whose future was almost past are now taking on another life in Morrison's new works.  Anri Sala examines the construction sites and time sinks of socio-political utopias and dystopias in relation to everyday life.  These are places that the imagined future's aura still enfolds even when their vectors into the present have apparently been interrupted or not understood.  William Kentridge traces the temporal simultaneity of subjective reality where memory and possibility are encompassed by the hazardous conditions of a dynamic and multi-layered present existence.  Tacita Dean investigates the future's ruins as alien presences masked as part of the present.  She searches for and discovers sites of utopian projection at the outer limits of culture, habitation and survival.  Michael Snow's spatialized oscillations within the periodicity of cinema compress and superimpose a dynamic image of the present.  Snow's recent works, such as *Corpus Callosum, make humorous and ironic incursions into the architecture of dialectical form within the continuum of the layered dimensions of many of his previous works.  –Patrick Clancy 

September 15, 2006

Who By Water, Bill Morrison (USA), 2006, 17 min., 35mm film shown on DVD.  Music by Michael Gordon

“Ship passengers are depicted staring wordlessly into the camera’s lens.  All of their numbers have by now been called.  And in staring back at them, we contemplate our own fate.”
–Bill Morrison

The Highwater Trilogy, Bill Morrison (USA), 2006, 31 min., 35mm film shown on DVD.  Music by David Lang and Michael Gordon. Libretto by Deborah Artman

Before I Enter
How To Pray
What We Build

“Ancient newsreel footage of storms, floods and icebergs produce a combination of anxiety and awe when viewed in the wake of recent meteorological disasters.” –Bill Morrison

Gotham, Bill Morrison (USA), 2004, 26 min., 35mm film shown on DVD.  Music by Michael Gordon

“New York continually rebuilds itself, reinventing and re-imagining itself, building on top of itself, layering over the past, declaring entire eras over and ushering in newly minted ones.”
–Bill Morrison

Sshtoorrty, Michael Snow (Canada), 2005, 20 min., digital video shown on DVD

“Sshtoorrty is a staged event which has been divided into two halves, each superimposed (sound and picture) on top of the other.  The title is the word SHORT superimposed on the word STORY.  It’s a “painting” about a painting in which Before and After become a Transparent Now.  Arrival and Departure are unified.” –Michael Snow

Intervista (Finding the Words), Anri Sala (Albania), 1998, 28 min., video shown on DVD, Albanian with English subtitles

“As political as it is personal, Intervista involves a Soviet-era interview with Sala’s mother, the film’s missing soundtrack and a disconnect between old meanings and new in the face of a new reality.” –Kim Levin

Dammi i colori (Give Me the Colors), Anri Sala (Albania), 2003, 15 min., video shown on DVD, Albanian with English subtitles

“The city's artist-mayor put into action his idea of coloring the exterior walls of Tirana's drab apartment blocks as a symbol of hope and a temporary sign that basic changes to the city's infrastructure were on their way.  Sala's film is not a documentary but rather a set of reflections about the possibilities of color and the disparities in our different experiences of what utopia and reality can mean.” –Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Tide Table, William Kentridge (South Africa), 2003, 8 min., 16mm film, 35mm film and video shown on DVD

“An elegiac work on youth, maturity, illness, awareness, worry, indolence and perhaps even destiny.” –Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Teignmouth Electron, Tacita Dean (UK), 2000, 7 min., 16mm film

“Even before I found the ‘Teignmouth Electron’ beached in the scrub on Cayman Brac, I had imagined it in the writings of J. G. Ballard.” –Tacita Dean

Bubble House, Tacita Dean (UK), 1999, 7 min., 16mm film

“While documenting the decayed hull of the ‘Teignmouth Electron,’ I drove up the other road on the hurricane coast of the small island and came across the Bubble House.  Both boat and house were welcome neglect on an otherwise over pampered island.” –Tacita Dean

Sound Mirrors, Tacita Dean (UK), 1999, 7 min., 16mm film

“The land around Dungeness on the southeast coast of England always feels old to me.  It feels 1970s and Dickensian, prehistoric and Elizabethan, Second World War and futuristic.  It just doesn’t function in the now.” –Tacita Dean

September 29, 2006  

Visiting Artist Michael Snow In Person
*Corpus Callosum, Michael Snow (Canada), 2002, 92 min., digital video

“The corpus callosum is a central region of tissue in the human brain which passes messages between the two hemispheres.  *Corpus Callosum, the film (or tape, or projected light work), is constructed of ‘betweens.’  Between beginning and ending, between natural and artificial, between fiction and fact, between hearing and seeing, between 1956 and 2002.  It’s a tragic-comedy of the cinematic variables.” –Michael Snow