Tickets: $10 Presale / $15 Day of Show / $20 at the Door
Things that matter in the world have weight. Ephemeral gestures manifest in solidity. Working with an array of distressed fascination devices—including Super-8mm projectors, video projection, record players and tape recorders, plant and animal detritus, minerals, machinery and more—Bolinas-based Keith Evans works as a paranaturalist sculptor, uniting dead media with the husks of once-living organisms. The collaborative 16mm work of local duo Beige (Kent Long and Vanessa O’Neill) is based largely on homebrew film processing and celluloid printing, with their hand-crafted film strips presented in elegant and overlapping multiple projection. Beige’s The Impenitent Thief takes as its starting point the viewer’s perspective in Tiepolo’s Scoperta della Vera Croce e Sant’Elena, “a painting wild with motion and the use of color to describe the path of ascension.” Using multiple points of projection and a multi-channel soundscape, The Impenitent Thief presents a dizzying view of grounded revelation and luminous form. Finally, Karl Lemieux (Montréal) and BJ Nilsen (Sweden) present Unearthed—the work’s first U.S. performance since its 2015 premiere at Sonic Acts: The Geologic Imagination, Amsterdam. A fragmented, shimmering, 6-projector work considering the impact of the Anthropocene era, Unearthed portrays Nikel, Russia, a heavily polluted site of industrial decay asserting a dark desolation against the sparse beauty of the Arctic landscape.
Performance Cinema: an exciting and emergent genre of avant-garde moving-image art which represents a crucial attack on the sterility of the contemporary, digitally-located media environment, arguing for the embodied, collective consideration of real-time, site-specific media experiences. Through mis-used or modified analog film projectors, live video synthesis and physical interaction with the media interface, performance cinema practitioners variously burn, etch, mutilate and destroy projected film, machinery and the image itself. Performance Cinema practitioners create immersive spectacles of sight and sound, opening a space for questioning and contemplating visual culture through direct activation of the senses. As a dynamic, regenerating and resurrecting media experience, Performance Cinema exists only in the moment of perception and is truly an art of its time. Full series information available here.
Perpetual Motion is a presentation of San Francisco Cinematheque in partnership with Gray Area and is supported by generous funding from the Fleishhacker Foundation, San Francisco Arts Commission, San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund/Grants for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation and by generous donations from Cinematheque’s individual donors and members.
