Jeff Keen: Works from the 1960s + 1970s
Elizabeth Dee Gallery
545 West 20th Street, New York NY 10011
January 12 – February 11, 2012
Opening Thursday, January 12, 18-20h

Elizabeth Dee Gallery is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition at the gallery and United States debut of paintings and films by Jeff Keen (b. 1923, UK). This important first exhibition in New York will explore in depth Keen's most influential and fundamental period of work, the 1960s and 1970s, during which he established a prolific visual practice extending to five decades of drawing, painting, experimental film, concrete poetry and performance.

Keen is primarily known as a legendary underground filmmaker whose work and activities coincided with the emergence of expanded cinema. He was one of the original participants in the 60s at the London Filmmakers Co-op. The BFI and later the British Arts Council supported and enabled Keen to make films and devise a multitude of drawings and paintings. During this period, Keen maintained jobs as a landscaper in the Parks and Recreation department of his hometown, Brighton, and sometimes as a postal worker delivering mail. The artist made movies primarily on weekends with his family and friends in an ensemble cast and his painting and drawing studio was for 40 years a repository of props and art that accumulated to extraordinary effect that has been fully documented.

Embracing the increasingly available technology of 8mm, 16mm and prevelance of American Pop imagery and Comics (and later Punk), Keen employed modes of popular media, technology and music in painting, drawing and collage using a stop frame animation process and in camera editing, resulting in active and evocative films. Utilizing a frequency of speed not found in work of the period, Keen, through the possibilities of the medium, brought new life to the significance of radical visual media.

Phenomenologies of Projection, Aesthetics of Transition
Anthony McCall 1970-79, 2001—
Exhibition and Symposium
Friday and Saturday, February 24 & 25, 2012
University of Chicago Film Studies Center

Using atmospheric haze and film projectors, artist Anthony McCall creates beautiful, visually captivating light sculptures that explore ideas of architecture, duration and embodiment. Invoking comparisons to natural formations like waterfalls and moonlight, McCall’s slowly moving luminous projections invite visitors to step into the light, using their bodies to alter the shimmering forms.

Experience the subtle poetics of McCall’s rarely exhibited 'Solid Light’ films at a special two-day event at the University of Chicago, featuring works on both celluloid film and digital media. This exhibition and its related symposium turn a critical spotlight onto key moments in an artistic career that has moved with singular coherence between the aesthetics of an analog and a digital media paradigm.

The installation You and I, Horizontal (2006, dv) will open the event at The Experimental Station, a community arts incubator in Hyde Park, Chicago on February 24 & 25, 6-10 p.m. A special screening of Line Describing a Cone (1973, 16mm) and its digital remake Line Describing a Cone 2.0 (2010, dv) will take place at the installation site on alternate evenings. This exhibit is free and open to the public.

On Saturday, February 25, Anthony McCall will present an artist talk at an afternoon symposium dedicated to his work, then participate in a roundtable with a panel of distinguished curators and scholars. The Symposium will take place at the Film Studies Center, 5811 S. Ellis Ave, University of Chicago. Reservations are recommended, and can be made at filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu.

For more information on the exhibit and symposium call 773-702-8596 or visit filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu.