A live projector performance with 16mm film and invented lenses by Jeannne Liotta, with a soundtrack by Eric Baus, Phil Cordelli, and Oren Silverman
Doors: 7pm
Tickets: £10 [£7 concessions]
A live projector performance made with one handmade 16mm loop, invented lenses, concrete and transparent objects and shadowplay. A series of light and dark gestures inspired by the total solar eclipse of August 2017. Not trusting photography’s ability to render the feel of those ineffable light conditions, the artist replaces the solar with the projection system in her own “restaging” of the event, bringing the cosmic into the confines of a projection room.
Path of Totality consists of one 16mm film loop with no images whatsoever running through a 16mm projector in a rhythm of intermittency, while the artist moves light out into the space and beyond the frame. Visual concepts of light latency, peripheral vision, and the cosmic imagination are activated through the use of simple objects and external water lenses, as one might use a flashlight and an orange to demonstrate the relationship between the sun and the earth.
The art of projection is posited as essentially mimetic of the cosmos — light source, screen, and reflection.
Path of Totality is named for the described path of the Moon’s shadow on the Earth’s surface during a total solar eclipse. In August 2017, “The Great American Eclipse”, the width of this path in the U.S was only about 70 miles wide , a narrow ribbon of moon shadow travelling over 1000 mph across numerous States.
Jeanna Liotta (NYC) makes films, moving image installations, projector performances and other lens based mediums operating at a lively intersection of art, science,& natural philosophy. She has been making work for over 3 decades, including early collaborations in film and performance with Bradley Eros, Her signature 16mm film of the night skies, Observando El Cielo (2007), has been much loved over the years, and received the Tiger Award for Short Film at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Her works have been seen at venues worldwide, from film festivals to micro cinemas, museums, galleries and basements, including The Whitney Museum of Art, The New York Film Festival, Flaherty NYC, Crossroads Festival, Experiments in Cinema Albuquerque, Museo Nitsch in Naples, Italy, The Wexner Center for the Arts, The McCormick Observatory, The Kopernik Observatory, and Songs for Presidents artist-run gallery in Ridgewood, Queens . Her works are collected by The Museum of Modern Art NY, The Vienna Film Museum, and Harvard and Duke Universities. Liotta researched the Joseph Cornell Film Collection at Anthology Film Archives for many years and has more recently published an essay in Millennium Film Journal, Enter Germs, Enter the World: Hand Processing Artists Films in the AIDS Era. Currently she is a Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder where she directs the graduate program in Film and has been mentoring graduate students in the Bard MFA program NY for many years . Her films are distributed by Lightcone, Paris and her work is represented by Microscope Gallery,NYC.