The Museum of Modern Art presents two exhibitions of moving image work by Ernie Gehr, one of America's most acclaimed avant-garde filmmakers.
Gehr (American, b. 1941), a self-taught artist who has been working in film and digital media for the past four decades, is one of the most celebrated and internationally recognized experimental filmmakers of the generation who came of age in the 1960s. Gehr's work has been shown and collected internationally by cinematheques, museums, and other art institutions. The director will be present on October 29, as part of the Museum's new Modern Mondays initiative (see separate release). In addition, special Magic Lantern programs of holiday works will be presented on November 30 and December 1 for adult and family audiences by early cinema experts David Francis and Joss Marsh.
Panoramas of the Moving Image: Mechanical Slides and Dissolving Views from Nineteenth-Century Magic Lantern Shows, a synchronized five-channel video work comprising images drawn from the age of pre-cinema, will be presented through February 25, 2008, in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1 and 2 Lobby Galleries. The works in the installation are century-old painted and printed images on glass that were used in early moving image presentations. These images are among the earliest forms of projected "motion picture" entertainment: with a beam of light projected through them, mechanical glass slides are manipulated to simulate various kinds of change in the image, and multiple projectors allow for superimposed and dissolving views. Brightly colored, handcrafted slides, depicting human activity, fantasy figures, and landscapes, were typically presented with live narration, music, and sound effects, in what became popular by the 1870s as Magic Lantern shows. Gehr's Panoramas of the Moving Image (2005) is presented as a video installation that uses 87 original slides and views, selected largely from Gehr's personal collection. The viewer's experience of the slides, which are projected side by side, is manipulated to create a mesmerizing wide-screen spectacle.
A selection of artifacts of nineteenth-century moving-image technology in the Titus 2 Gallery complement the images in the video installation. These artifacts, of the type used at the dawn of cinema, include vintage paper Zoetrope strips (illustrations that create the illusion of movement when viewed through a spinning, perforated drum—the Zoetrope) and discs from Phenakistiscopes (hand-held viewing devices that use mirrors to create a strobing effect when spun, causing the reflected image to appear to move). The exhibition is organized by Jytte Jensen, Curator, and Ronald Magliozzi, Assistant Curator, Department of Film.
"Ernie Gehr's Panoramas of the Moving Image reveals that there is a simple, elegant minimalism at the heart of late-nineteenth-century popular entertainment that feels contemporary in 2007," says Mr. Magliozzi. "This comes as a surprise, considering the decorative excess we typically associate with Victorian culture."
"Ernie Gehr has established himself as one of the true masters of film form," adds Ms. Jensen. "His graceful sense of style and subtle, poetic sensibility have deeply affected the cinematic avant-garde. He brings the same sense of creative exploration of space, frame, and rhythm to his more recent involvement with digital technology in theater-projected works as well as in his installation pieces."
Concurrent with this gallery installation, Ernie Gehr: Moving-Image Minimalist, a series of short films and digital works by Gehr, will be presented in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters from September 17, 2007 through February 25, 2008. These disparate, avant-garde films chart the artist's development. Characterized by strong lines and a certain formal severity, which in some of his works has a meditative quality, Gehr's films and recent digital works for theatrical exhibition create a sense of wonder with their unfailingly lush, sensual image quality and minute attention to contrast and framing.
Gehr began making 8mm films in the mid-1960s in New York and has completed more than 24 films in various formats. After moving to San Francisco in 1988, where he was a much-sought-out teacher at the San Francisco Art Institute, he continued to shoot, on film, subjects that have long occupied him: place, space, and setting. Apparent throughout his work is a clear affection for the devices and styles of early cinema, including the static camera that characterized much of the early years of the form. In 2004, he returned to New York where he continues to work and teach. Gehr is a recipient of numerous grants and awards from institutions such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the
American Film Institute.
The opening night screenings—Essex Street Market, Noon Time Activities, Workers Leaving the Factory (after Lumière), and Greene Street (all 2004)—present exquisitely framed images of Soho and the Lower East Side from another era: the early 1970s. The films, once conceived as part of a larger work that was abandoned, were resurrected in 2004 and edited into four separate sections that together present a palpable difference between the city of the 1970s and now.
Among the other films in the exhibition is the landmark film Serene Velocity (1970), which is a rapidly edited study of a corridor and is on the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. In Glider (2001), Gehr's camera appears to float—or glide—over distorted and refracted images of the sea, the shore, and its environs.
Continuing the early cinema theme in the theaters, two special Magic Lantern performances will be presented November 30 (for adults) and December 1 (for families). These unique, live programs, using original glass slides, will feature seasonal works by Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol) and others, 6presented by early cinema experts David Francis and Joss Marsh. -- www.moma.org
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