my eyes can't focus and my brain is talking: A Film Program in Two Parts

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Lisa Cooley is proud to present my eyes can't focus and my brain is talking, a special night of experimental short films. Taking reel #9 (“Eric Says All”) of Andy Warhol’s 1966 film The Chelsea Girls as a touchstone, the selection highlights common strains that run through the visionary and psychedelic experiments of the 1960s, the structural impulses of the 1970s, and beyond. This mix of new and historic films has been organized by Warren Ng, and are presented in conjunction with the exhibition Eric’s Trip, curated by Cynthia Daignault and Mark Loiacono, on view at Lisa Cooley from June 28th through August 1st. The program offers a rare opportunity to see many of the most seminal filmic explorations of perception, light, color, and consciousness in an intimate environment and in their native format.

Eric Emerson's lysergically-aided implosion into the self suggests a desire to return to a primal originary state where he can subsist in a less threatening world of pure sensation, a world where light and shadow mingle with the blurred motions of amorphous shapes and forms. Our program re-imagines Eric's trip as an immersive experience where cinematic darkness becomes a hallucinatory hall of mirrors, an incantatory world of almost-material light. The films offer a phenomenology of images through which we can begin to reconstruct an idea of the world anew—a kind of visual A-Z—through an immersive concentration on the minute permutations and possibilities of the perceptible and imperceptible.  

Each of the works in my eyes can’t focus and my brain is talking explore formal strategies of image-making and the notion of the camera/eye's gaze as a representation of consciousness. They employ the disorienting effects of the flicker, ghostly superimpositions, corroded surfaces, obscured motion, and the blurring of spatiality and the perceptual field. The works examine the twin dualities of the spectral and material, and interiority and exteriority. By foregrounding cinema’s visual containment and at the same time calling to attention the suggestion of an outside—a beyond of our perceptual faculties and that of the machinery of the visible—they challenge the limits of the frame and put pressure upon the very edges of perception itself.

The full program of film and video works will be screened in a single evening and be comprised of two sections, Part 1: Edges of Perception b/w Everyday is Easter Day, and Part 2: I Can Hear the Horses Dancing in My Head (There are Spirits in This House). The program will include works by Jeremy Blake, Paul Clipson, Victoria Fu, Kurt Kren, Yayoi Kusama, George Landow, Malcolm Le Grice, Marie Menken, Paul Sharits, Josh Slater, Michael Snow, and Jud Yalkut. 

Program 1: Edges of Perception b/w Everyday is Easter Day

- Marie Menken, Lights, 1964-66, 16mm, 6 min 
- Paul Sharits, Ray Gun Virus, 1966, 16mm, 14 min
- Kurt Kren, Asyl, 1975, 16mm, 8 min 
- Jeremy Blake, Reading Ossie Clark, 2003, digital, 9 min
- Paul Clipson, Another Void, 2012, 16mm, 10:30 min
- Michael Snow, SSHTOORTY, 2005, digital, 20 min 
- Stan Brakhage, Yggdrasill: Whose Roots Are Stars in the Human Mind, 1998, 16mm, 18 min

Program 2: I Can Hear the Horses Dancing in My Head (There are Spirits in This House)

- Jud Yalkut, Kusama's Self-Obliteration, 1967, 16mm, 23 min
- Jud Yalkut, Turn Turn Turn, 1968, 16mm, 8:30 min
- Kurt Kren, Underground Explosion, 1969, 16mm, 6 min
- Owen Land, Film in Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles, Etc., 1966, 16mm, 6 min
- Paul Sharits, Bad Burns, 1982, 16mm, 6 min 
- Malcolm Le Grice, Berlin Horse, 1970, 16mm, 7 min
- Victoria Fu, Lorem Ipsum 1, 2014, digital, 13 min
- Victoria Fu, Three Breaths, 2012, 16mm, 2:20 min
- Josh Slater, The Sleeper's Eye, 2014, digital, 5:53 min

Venue: 

Lisa Cooley Gallery - New York, United States

Dates: 

Thursday, July 24, 2014 - 19:00 to Friday, July 25, 2014 - 21:55

Category: 

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Screening is from 7 - 10pm 

Screening is from 7 - 10pm 

Lisa Cooley, 107 Norfolk St. New York, NY 10002

Dates: 

Thursday, July 24, 2014 - 19:00 to Friday, July 25, 2014 - 21:55
  • 107 Norfolk St
    10002   New York, New York
    United States
    40° 43' 8.418" N, 73° 59' 14.4744" W