Latvian House (491 College St., Licensed Venue)
Luis Recoder & Sandra Gibson in person!
Luis Recoder and Sandra Gibson explore the neglected evolutionary
pathways of cinema, working directly on the filmstrip’s photochemical
surface, and often employing multiple projections. Many of their
films exist only as they are performed live. Their work has recently
been selected to screen in the 2004 Whitney Biennial.
Recoder’s meta-cinema has propelled him into a kind of semi-stardom
of his own. In the last three years, his films and film performances
have appeared at the New York Film Festival, the Viennale, the Institute
of Contemporary Art in London, and Anthology Film Archives. Whitney
Museum curator Chrissie Iles compares Recoder’s films to the
work of light sculptor James Turrell: both artists use light to
explore the boundaries between the palpable and the insubstantial.
Originally trained as a painter, Gibson has taken the exploration
of shape and color to the medium of film. While her earlier films
(Soundings, 2001; Edgeways, 1999) were made with
an optical printer, recent works address the film’s surface
directly. Her films have been widely screened at such venues as
the London Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam,
VideoEx and Pacific Film Archive.
In addition to their individual works, Gibson and Recoder have
formed the collaborative duo the presstapes, often performing with
double 35mm projections, and interfering with the light to create
a cascading canvas of color fields and refracted light. The presstapes
have received awards from Media City in Windsor, Ontario and the
Portland Documentary and Experimental Film Festival (PDX) in Portland,
Oregon. |
