Swamp songs is an online group exhibition, of environmental entropic exploration, presenting a series of films that deal with terrain exploration of any sort or matters, from the deserted roads of Saint Pierre island in Newfoundland to the pristine tundra grounds of Siberia, from the intimate ten hundred inch radii details shot in the wilderness of upstate New York to the expanded Trucking shot and travelling film of a Canadian “dump”, zooming in and closing with the alchemic micro-organism of a recycling “landfill” in Indiana. The films presented here question the way we see/film the world as much as what surfaces from it.
Charlemagne Palestine
ISLAND SONGS, 1972
15 min. 52 sec.
In Island Song, which Palestine made on the French island of St. Pierre, off the coast of Newfoundland, the artist straps a video camera to a motorcycle and then drives around the island as though searching for an escape....His chanting voice merges with the vibrations of the motor, forming an incessant soundtrack that echoes the jarring motion of the camera. The piece concludes with a close-up of rocks on the beach, where Palestine's journey ends.
Michael Snow
SEATED FIGURES, 1988
22 min. 14 sec.
Seated Figures is a 40-minute consideration of a landscape from the perspective of a pipe. The artist appears to have bolted his camera, lens down, to a metal arm extending off the back of a truck ... then driven over asphalt and dirt roads, out to the beach, along a riverbed, and through a field of daisies. Although hypnotic, the movement is not continuous. The vehicle stops, reverses direction, then accelerates to produce a diagonally striated force field. It juxtaposes our seated, static figures against a constantly moving ground.
Seated Figures represents a continuation of Michael Snow's project for the cinema, the exploration of the syntactical construction of filmic language through an exhaustive cataloguing of the possibilities inherent in any particular cinematic movement of device.
Phill Niblock
THIR (TEN HUNDRED INCH RADII), 1972
43 min. 26 sec.
Named for "Ten Hundred Inch Radii", a performance of film and music from the series "Environments" by composer and filmmaker Phill Niblocks. Shot in upstate New York in 1972, around that time Niblock was travelling around with a motorbike filming everything he saw, while in exploration around Keene Valley, upstate New York in the Adirondack Mountains in 1971-1972 Niblock attempted to document and film everything that struck his view while grounded at a particular location around Ten hundred inch radii of his position. A scan of sorts, and definitely a new stance and direction of the structural and urban programmatic practices of that period, introducing a much more contemplative embedding of nature in new prophetic ways.
Carlos Casas
VEZDEKHOD, 2009
30 min.
A journey to the wilderness in the far away reaches of the Siberian tundra. A vezdekhod, a soviet all terrain tank is making its way, through incommensurable and unreachable tundra grounds on a exploration to find a reindeer herd lost in the wilderness. This journey is equally sonic than visual, and tries to capture the extreme experience of travelling inside a Vezdekhod Tank while describing the Landscape through the tanks’s entropic qualities. A the same time a journey to reach the ultimate wild frontier as it is to recall the physical limits of the spectator.
Image by Carlos Casas Images and sound captured on location somewhere in the tundra, Chukotka Region, Northeastern Siberia, Russian Federation. N 66° 37’ 916. W 172° 40’ 353.Sept 2006. Music by Domick Fernow (Prurient)
Jennifer Reeves
LANDFILL 16, 2010/11
9 min.
Exhumed 16mm film from my own “landfill” in Indiana, constitute the canvas of LANDFILL 16. After finishing my double-projection WHEN IT WAS BLUE I was horrified by the bulk of outtakes that would normally end up in a landfill. So I temporarily buried the footage to let enzymes in the soil begin to decompose the image, and later I hand-painted that film to give it new life. Within this pulsating, abstract moving painting I attempt to express my dread of man-made waste. This “recycling” is a meditation on nature’s losing battle to decompose relics of our abandoned technologies and productions
Entrada actualizada el el 24 jun de 2020
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