Summer Knowledge
Artists Space
38 Greene Street, 3rd Floor
New York
December 4-19, 2009

Curated by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, Summer Knowledge is a series of one-person screenings presenting a multi-generational selection of artists working in the moving image. In keeping with the project of Beard and Halter¹s Brooklyn venue Light Industry, each event will allow time for dialog and discussion.

William E. Jones
Anne Charlotte Robertson
Michael Robinson
Paul Sharits
Leslie Thornton
Emily Wardill

Summer Knowledge launches the first in a series of programs with Beard and Halter through December 2010.

Michael Robinson: Flowers in the Attic
Friday, December 4, 7:30pm

Since 2000, Michael Robinson has created a body of film and video work that combines the formal vocabulary of avant-garde cinema with evocative appropriations of late 20th-century media artifacts, blending these materials into distinctively uncanny experiences, structured with the soft seductions of a pop song. Videogame environments and Catholic liturgy, the anodyne aesthetics of National Geographic and a histrionic scene from Little House on the Prairie flow together to explore the contours of collective memory through a poetics of devotion and loss.

Titles will include:
- Chiquitita and the Soft Escape, 16mm, 2003, 10 mins
- you don¹t bring me flowers, 16mm, 2005, 8 mins
- The General Returns from One Place to Another, 16mm/video, 2006, 11 mins
- And We All Shine On, 16mm, 2006, 7 mins
- Victory Over the Sun, 16mm, 2007, 13 mins
- Hold Me Now, video, 2008, 5 mins
- All Through the Night, video, 2008, 5 mins
- If There Be Thorns, 16mm/video, 2009, 12 mins

Emily Wardill: The Answer to the Riddle Was an Image
Saturday, December 5, 7:30pm

"The answer to the riddle was an image, but that image was remembered to be different from the way it had originally existed."

Recalling both the compositional rigors of structural-materialist filmmakers like Peter Gidal as well as the inventive, lo-fi theatricality of New Romantics such as Derek Jarman, the films of Emily Wardill are a kind of strange, brilliant marriage of two wildly disparate traditions of British underground cinema. Radiating outward from a diverse set of materials--the writings of Nietzsche, a hypnosis case study, medieval iconography, and the chromophotography of Étienne Jules Marey--her work maintains a philosophical density and an agile visual sense. It represents a profoundly idiosyncratic approach to film form that also addresses some of the medium¹s most fundamental questions, of the relationship between what we see and what we know, of representation and its limits.

Titles will include:
- Born Winged Animals and Honey Gatherers of the Soul, 16mm, 2005, 9 mins
- Basking in What Feels Like 'An Ocean of Grace' I Soon Realise That I'm Not
- Looking at It, but Rather I Am It, Recognising Myself, 16mm, 2006, 8 mins
- Ben, 16mm, 2007, 10 mins
- Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck, 16mm, 2007, 10 mins
- The Diamond (Descartes' Daughter), 16mm, 2008, 11 mins

William E. Jones: v.o. + Film Montages (For Peter Roehr)
Friday, December 11, 7:30pm

Based in Los Angeles, William E. Jones creates film, video and publications that investigate pornography and other marginal media as ephemeral archives of queer experience. This evening¹s event presents his featurette v.o. (2006, 59 mins), a grubbily austere, conceptually elegant collection of dramatic non-sex scenes from the William Higgins-era golden age of gay porn films, set to a variety of disjunctively highbrow European soundtracks: an interview with Jean Genet, or clips of dialogue from films by the likes of Werner Schroeter and Raul Ruiz. To be shown with Jones¹ Film Montages (For Peter Roehr) (2006, 11 mins), a video made in honor of the German artist that takes simple repetition as its first principle.

Anne Charlotte Robertson: Selections from the Five Year Diary
Saturday, December 12, 7:30pm

Totaling over thirty-six hours in length, Anne Charlotte Robertson¹s Five Year Diary constitutes one of the most epic works every recorded on Super 8: a densely collaged audio-visual chronicle of her daily life in Massachusetts and her battles with manic depression, paranoia and borderline schizophrenia. In the course of the Diary (which, begun in 1981, now covers well over five years), Robertson documents her own breakdowns and hospitalizations, her obsessive love for Doctor Who actor Tom Baker, her battles with weight, the side effects of drug therapies, and the death of her three-year-old niece, Emily. As Robertson describes it, her often harrowing Diary tells ³the story of a mind¹s survival.²

³I think of my diaries as a materialization of the present, which is a storehouse. I used to think of them in terms of showing them to a man who would say to me, ?What have you been doing all your life?¹ and then I¹d show them to him.² ? AR

Leslie Thornton: Early Films, 1975-1987
Friday, December 18, 7:30pm
Presented with UbuWeb and introduced by Kenneth Goldsmith

Leslie Thornton¹s lush, complex film and video works explore the mechanisms of desire and meaning, while probing past the boundaries of language and narrative conventions. Resisting easy categorization, Thornton's works are steeped in theoretical portent and filled with rich and intuitive imagery, experimental narratives crossing science fiction, ethnographic, and documentary forms.  

In preparation for the arrival of her early films on UbuWeb, Thornton will present a screening of original 16mm and digital transfers, including a newly restored version of her seminal Peggy and Fred In Hell. For the occasion, her work will be uploaded and launched on UbuWeb during the show, and some titles will be shown comparatively, on both old and new formats.  

I think of the web as sprawl. What if the internet was just Ubu, a place of treasures, of self-contained works with shape and history? I want to see these old films show up online, whispers of another sense of space. ­ LT

Titles will include:
- X-TRACTS, 16mm, 1975, 9 mins
- All Right You Guys, 16mm, 1976, 16 mins
- Jennifer, Where Are You?, 16mm, 1981, 10 mins
- Oh, China, Oh, 1983, 16mm, 3 mins
- Peggy and Fred in Hell: The Prologue, 1985, 16mm, 21 mins
- She Had He So He Do He To Her, 16mm, 1987, 5 mins

Paul Sharits: Analytical Studies I-IV
Saturday, December 19, 3-8pm

Made between 1971 and 1976, Paul Sharits¹ rarely-shown series Analytical Studies consists of four sections, each devoted to a specific aspect of film technology, containing several sub-sections that play through various formal permutations of the given characteristic.

This event will take place over an afternoon, with each work introduced by a guest speaker. After the screenings, the event concludes with a panel discussion on Sharits¹ work.

- Analytical Studies I: The Film Frame, 16mm, 1971-76, 25 mins
A set of pure color studies, each exploring one dominant hue. Their rhythmic structure mimics the ³typical fortification illusions preceding a migraine attack.²

1. Modular Blue
2. Green Matrix
3. White Field
4. Orange Field
5. Pink Modulation A
6. Pink Modulation B
7. Temporal frameworks
8. Migraine Onset A
9. Migraine Onset B
10. Migraine Onset C
11. Migraine Onset D

- Analytical Studies II: Un-Frame-Lines, 16mm, 1971-1976, 30 mins
A highly varied and playful series of short sketches involving induced camera "mistakes," printing "errors" and various "assaults" upon film.

- Analytical Studies III: Color Frame Passages, 16mm, 1973-74, 22 mins
In this series, the first section becomes the subject matter for the subsequent six, each going back to the original material with varying degrees and forms of reflexivity.

Section I: "Specimen"
Section II: "Divergent Strip Vectors"
Section III: "Document"
Section IV: "Strip in Strip"
Section V: "Strip of Strip, A"
Section VI: "Strip of Strip, B"
Section VII: "Strip of Strip of Strip B"

- Analytical Studies IV: Blank Color Frames, 16mm, 1975-76, 15 mins
Like Analytical Studies I, these short works each develop a different rhythmic and/or melodic idea using only rapid successions of color frames, here analyzed through rephotography.

Specimen II
Specimen III
Specimen IV
Diagonal Temporality B
Diagonal Temporality C
Temporal Frame B