The film/video work of Margaret Rorison — co-founder and curator of Baltimore’s Sight Unseen screening series — is described as “an impressionistic exploration into the visceral nature of memory and experience.” A featured artist in Crossroads 2014 and ’15, Rorison appears in person for the first time visits San Francisco to present a selection of her hypnotic works including the celestial elegy The Waiting Sands; PULL/DRIFT, “an immersive experiment in movement, rhythm, and ritual” made in collaboration with the Effervescent Dance Collective; vindmøller, a dense hand-wrought study of weather and Danish wind power; the landscape-based portrait films Gowanus Haze, The Birds of Chernobyl and SCANSION and her latest film Funes el memorioso. Rorison is paired tonight with Oakland-based filmmaker Zach Iannazzi who will present examples of his masterful hand-made cinema including California Picture Book, a drifting found footage compendium of Nor Cal seasons past; Seed Catalog, a graphic and abstract imagining of a visionary cinema inventor; and II, an foreboding double-projected home movie collage reflecting on accidental impressionism, mid-century male bonding rituals and the hubris of hunting culture.

Zach Iannazzi and Margaret Rorison In Person

Toby Tatum & Mark French are proud to announce the programme for Altered States.

Altered States is an immersive multi-screen show of the latest experimental film and video work curated by the Hastings-based filmmakers Toby Tatum and Mark French. Altered States features moving image by over seventy of the most fascinating international moving image practitioners working today, much of it unseen in the UK.

This exhibition includes the fruits of a worldwide search for works that articulate film’s power to initiate heightened states of consciousness, transporting us across the threshold into a mind-expanding visionary state. The programme features a selection of cutting edge films that imaginatively reshape the base materials of the everyday world into something rich and strange.

Joseph Cornell was a cinephile, film collector, filmmaker and pioneering American assemblage artist. He called his work ‘white magic’ to distinguish it from the darker arts of the surrealists with whom he had a dialogue. From the late 30s onward he reworked Hollywood movies, travelogues and education films to create touching, sophisticated edits and juxtapositions. The first programme includes Rose Hobart which Dali accused Cornell of stealing from his dreams, and the newly rediscovered The Wool Collage. The second programme shows collaborations with other experimental filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage and Larry Jordan. Gnir Rednow and other titles here draw on material shot by Cornell’s collaborators which he then edited and reworked according to his particular aesthetic.