The narration—interrupted by the soundtrack of Alfred E. Green's 1948 western Four Faces West—describes a 19th century photograph by Timothy O’Sullivan, titled Historic Spanish Record of the Conquest. The photograph is slightly out of focus, pinned against a bluish wall, and flaps in response...
Located somewhere between the writings of Robert Smithson and the westerns of Howard Hawks—that somewhere being the present, momentarily suspended in a few video fragments of the landscape. A here and an elsewhere, a site (sight) and its nonsite (nonsight). Another movie adrift in the atmosphere....
An oblique remake of Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1951), Ray’s Place follows Ray from his haunts in New York City to Binghamton where, exiled from Hollywood, he taught alongside members of the American avant-garde. Participating in both Hollywood’s golden age and the experimental...
the franklinia flower, now extinct in the wild, appears here as a printed image (a drawing from 1782) pinned against a kitchen wall. hand and figure move disjointedly. the light of day gives way to electricity, to darkness, and to morning. recorded on a video camera built in 2002: an obsolete image...
Daily dedications to a minor artisan of the classical Hollywood western. Each segment was originally a kind of letter, a private correspondence, sent in fragments to a friend over a few weeks—an ode to R.G. but also to B.C. (an ode to cinema, to everyday life, and to the cinephilic fantasy of...
Set at an artificial reservoir in North Carolina, RESERVOIR (SEVEN FRAGMENTS) is a meditation on the unnatural histories of the American environment. The film approaches both the cinematic image and the landscape it captures as damaged, estranged things—things adrift in a world of irreparable...
A solitary figure pirates "A Ilha dos Prazeres Proibidos" (Carlos Reichenbach 1979), while also downloading "Carson City" (André De Toth, 1952). We see some of the latter film. The figure departs, wakes up, to then go about his day, leaving the door open. It is early spring.
The landscape here is an assemblage of fragments—of disjuncts. Some vain repetitions as the season changes and a cloud passes by. "We are expected to rejoice in darkness, and triumph in mutability; to lay the foundation of happiness in things which momentarily change or fade; and to expect the...
