Sabrina Gschwandtner at LMAK

A visit to LMAK, just below Delancey Street, and some wonderful pieces by Sabrina Gschwandtner.  Illuminated quilts sewn together from film.

Viewed from afar the quilts resemble fabric quilts, but looking close there are the sprocket holes, optical soundtracks, the frame lines, the sequences of images, the punctures made by the sewing machine.  It is a forest, and then it is trees.  The effect is not unlike the experience of viewing a painting by John Singer Sargent both close and far.  From a distance are objects of a tactile stolidity: faces, hair, fabric, jewelry.  Up close these dissolve away, the illusion is broken, another painting emerges that is about the paint, its tactile qualities spread on the canvas, the speed and movement of the brushstrokes.  Or perhaps the pointillist works of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac are an appropriate comparison, for understanding the near and far effect that Sabrina works with in these pieces?

There is an interesting parallel in the sewing machine and the motion picture and camera, both of which are employed in these pieces.  The two inventions are Nineteenth Century mechanisms utilizing intermittent motion.  The film moves through the camera, advanced by the the pulldown claw, where it stops with a frame in the gate, the shutter opens, light passes through, creating the image on the film.  In much the same way, the drop feed sewing machine employs the "feed dog" to advance the fabric, as the fabric stops, the needle comes down, and the thread passes through the fabric creating the stitch.

The the last day to see the show is Sunday October 21, 2012, so make your way down to LMAK soon!

Cheers!

Views of the Views from the Avant-Garde

The fall season brings the New York Film Festival and Views from the Avant-Garde. 

Last year this blog had and posting about how "Views" serves as a meeting place for the avant-garde film community.  But this time the grievances about the curating make it harder and harder to write about the event itself without paying attention to the problem of who is shown and who is not.*

There have always been complaints about the programming of Views.  These can range from the sight of some of the same names in the schedule year after year to a more charged accusation of nepotistic tendencies to a general question of "is that all there is?"  Some of it is fair and some is not.  The question of curatorial taste, for instance, is something where I would argue for giving benefit to the curator.  Curators should show the work representative of what they feel is worth showing.  Otherwise one might as well just have an open screening.  And to some extent a curator should select work that will end up being more challenging than satisfying.  But one shouldn't be too hard on the curator for this.  It means that they were pushing at the boundaries rather than just doing something safe and boring.  And so complaints of curatorial taste might be more of a gripe than a grievance.

But as far as the issue of how many men are show at Views and how many women are not, therein we discover a serious problem.  A more gender-balanced program is not really something requiring much extra effort.  Why?  Because there are many women filmmakers doing interesting work.  A curator is likely to have a balance between men and women just because that reflects the authorship of the interesting films and videos that are being made.  And yet time and again this disparity appears, even after it has been brought to the attention of the curators themselves.  Currently there's a fascinating Facebook thread that begins with a post from the filmmaker Su Friedrich: "WTF is wrong with Mark and Gavin? This year, 12 one-man shows, none by women. Last year, 10 of men, only 2 of women..." (read the rest of it here)

What makes this all the more of a grievance is the high profile and prestige connected with The New York Film Festival.  Although you're likely to see interesting work at Madcat or Another Experiment, these adventurous and worthwhile grassroots festivals are not the leviathan of the uptown film world that is The New York Film Festival; garnering attention and recognition for the filmmaker.

Hopefully next year will be different. . . but it's hard to hold out too much hope when one had that same wish last year too.


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*Full disclosure:  I submitted a new work that was not selected, but before coming to the conclusion that this blog post just sour grapes it might be worth asking if it would have been embarrassing to have actually been accepted in such an imbalanced program, as was pondered by someone on the thread.