Screening Series I: Early Winter - Exhibitions

Campoli Presti is pleased to announce a series of seasonal screenings taking place at the gallery space in Paris. Each edition will feature the work of three artists and will be directed towards a particular question. The first installment « Early Winter », will be dedicated to the work of Michael Snow, Tony Conrad and Alex Hubbard. This edition brings together artists that explore the space of tension that exists between film’s material and formal elements and the supposed reality that is represented. By testing the conventions of the cinematic device, these artists experiment formally to explore ideas around stasis, the illusion of movement, and the metrics of montage.

23 – 29 January 2016 Michael Snow
Opening 23 January, 4 -7 pm

Opening on Saturday 23 January, the first week of screenings will feature the works Solar Breath (Northern Caryatids) (2002) and Snow, (de, à, pour) Thierry (2007) by Michael Snow.

Snow’s cinematic strategies oscillate between uninterrupted camera movements- exploring horizontal, vertical, lateral or spiral directions- and static shot works. Solar Breath and Snow document the performance of two natural phenomenons, the wind and the snow, seen from a domestic setting and singularly framed in the shape of a window. The films take the act of recording and its time, space relations into their purest state. Through minimal interventions on the medium, these projections involve the conditions of the cinematic device as a whole.

Solar Breath (Northern Caryatids) captures the movement of the wind on a white curtain one hour before the sunset. The tissue’s versatility, its folds, furrows and billows reveal a partial landscape on the outside in random intervals. The title of the film evokes the figure of the Caryatid, a stone carving of a draped female figure, serving as an architectural support – in this case, providing the cadence of the film.

Snow, (de, à, pour) Thierry is a tribute to the late Thierry Kuntzel that formally derives into a self-portrait. In two zoom manipulations, the camera reaches the vertical point that divides the plane in two, later bringing the silent snow into focus until reaching an almost white monochromatic abstraction. Snow continues to explore the nature of perception as well as the viewers’ conventional expectations by straightforward manipulations of the camera, as initially explored in his seminal film Wavelength (1967).

In these films, the landscape offers itself generously to the viewer through the architecture of the window frame, mediating between spaces and establishing a site of communication. During the Renaissance, painting-as-a-window-of-the-world guaranteed the continuum between the beholder’s space and the picture space. In Snow’s films, the window’s objective nature is foregrounded as well, but just to evoke a field where image trafficking still takes place, a field that ultimately belongs to imagination.

30 January – 12 February Opening 30 January, 4 -7 pm Tony Conrad
Loose Connection, 1972-2011 Super 8 to 16 mm/HD video 54 min, 54 sec

TC.167
ed 2/5 2 Aps

Opening on Saturday 30 January, the second week of screenings will feature the work Loose Connection (1972-2011) by Tony Conrad. Conrad’s interest in the role of the shutter began as early as 1966, with the experimental film The Flicker, where a black and a white frame switched at controlled rates, producing a flickering effect. A key work of structural filmmaking, the film focused exclusively on the shutter’s function that allows one full frame to be replaced exactly on top of another full frame, producing the illusion of a moving image on screen.

Originally shot in super8 and then transferred to 16mm, Loose Connection explores the correspondence between an observer-space and a filmed space. Both the camera shutter and the projector shutter emerge again as a key element in this relationship, altering between a closed and an open state. Conrad purposely set the camera and the projector shutter out of sync to emphasize the flickering effect.

Loose Connection was shot in a causal context in order to delineate its status as a documentary. A rotating camera of Conrad’s invention is taken for a test on a family walk to buy groceries. Mounted on a rolling cart, the camera stops spinning every few seconds and snaps a still picture, capturing light-shot images of an everyday urban situation. The simultaneous sound follows the documentary nature whilst also activating possible images as the screen turns black.The film’s display is accompanied by a text written by Tony Conrad titled “On Loose Connection as a definitional extension of Documentary Film” (1973), where he lays out the relationship between subject and observer in the film.

Tony Conrad lives and works in Buffalo, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Greene Naftali, New York (2016); Kunsthalle Wien, Austria (2014); Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Villa Croce, Genoa (2013); Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Berlin (2012); Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne (2009); The Kitchen, New York (1973). His work is in the collection of Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

13 February – 26 February 2016 Opening 13 February, 4 -7 pm Alex Hubbard
Eat Your Friends, 2012

Digital video, colour, sound 5 min, 39 sec
Edition of 5

Combining video art and cinematics, painting and sculptures, Alex Hubbard captures in each given instant the complex mechanics of movement, creating a convergence between abstraction and the behaviour of everyday household items and commonplace objects.

Shot vertically, Eat Your Friends is framed into different segments and is able to engage multiple planes and perspectives simultaneously, expanding beyond painting’s provided limit. The work bears various points of attention and can be fractioned into minimal units, yet forming part of a sequence of events that affect one another in a process. While evoking Peter Fischli and David Weiss’ concatenations, Hubbard explores the ambiguity of color in motion and the perceptual consequences of a three-dimensional form of painting.

Alex Hubbard (b. Newport, Oregon in 1975) lives and works in Los Angeles. Hubbard received his B.F.A. from the Pacific North West College of Art in 1999 and participated in the Whitney Museum ́s Independent Study Program in 2002-2003. Alex Hubbard has had recent solo exhibitions at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Massachusetts (2014); the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012); Kunsthalle Berlin, Germany (2010); Centre for Contemporary Visual Art, Toronto (2010) and The Kitchen, New York (2010). His work forms part of the public collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Seattle Art Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art – North Miami (MOCA); the Jumex Foundation, Mexico and the FRAC (Regional Funds for Contemporary Arts) Poitou-Charentes, France.