Sunday, May 3, 2009

Cold Cinema: Films by Liz Wendelbo


Liz Wendelbo, OPTICKS V, C-print, 20 x 24'', 2005

Liz Wendelbo is an artist who makes photographs, video, music and performance. Born in Norway, Wendelbo is a key member of the NYC minimal electronic music scene as a member of Xeno and Oaklander. Anthology Film Archives is showing a series of her short films, titled OPTICKS 1-x1v on May 23 at 7:30pm. AFA's website writes of Wendelbo, in reference to her upcoming showing there,
Born in the dark era that is the new millennium in New York, the ‘cold cinema’ of Liz Wendelbo is a return to analogue film. Originating from the NY Minimal Electronics music scene (Xeno & Oaklander), Wendelbo engages in a form of filmmaking that predicates resistance to cinema as a virtual medium. Her latest work is a series of short three-minute films entitled OPTICKS. Her films explore themes of darkness, rituals, Goth iconography, and film as a medium, with melancholy and restraint. With a fondness for obsolete technology, she uses 16mm and double-8mm as her shooting medium of choice, in both color and black-and-white.

OPTICKS is structured in a modular way: the short films are numbered one through fourteen and are interchangeable. Three sections surface overall – the abstract optical experiments of the MAXWELL TARTAN RIBBON series (a 19th-century Scottish physicist, Maxwell ‘projected’ the first color photograph using Newton’s color theory in 1861 – the image was a tartan ribbon); the dance- and movement-based Goth RITUALS series; and the ‘film-as-historical-document’ framework of World War II, industrial, and personal found footage of the EXCAVATION and COLUMNS series.

OPTICKS I – XIV
2008, 3 minutes x 14, 16mm, color/b&w, sound. Editing by Taylor Thompson; music by Sean McBride.

Total running time: ca. 50 minutes.

Upcoming Showings:
Saturday May 23 7:30 PM

Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue
New York, NY 10003
(212) 505-5181

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