An Evening with Leslie Thornton Mon, Feb 12, 7:00 p.m. The Museum of Modern Art, New York
In conjunction with Leslie Thornton’s HANDMADE, currently on view in MoMA’s Gund Lobby, Thornton joins us for a screening and discussion celebrating her pathbreaking five-decade career. The evening’s program ranges from her earliest interrogations of language, representation, and technology to the New York premiere of Ground, which she produced in 2020 during residencies at the California Institute of Technology and CERN, the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Thornton emerged as a pivotal figure during the 1970s, encouraging cinema’s shift from the structuralist and cinéma vérité traditions in which she was trained to a practice grounded in linguistics and feminism. With a keen commitment to voice, Thornton has carved out a unique space at the intersection of multiple media histories to ponder the technological landscape of postwar America. From *Peggy and Fred in Hell*’s consideration of television and artificial intelligence to the emotional evocation of nuclear warfare in Cut from Liquid to Snake, this program highlights an extraordinary artist who has illuminated fundamental shifts in how we see and make sense of the world.
Program:
- X-TRACTS. 1975. 16mm transferred to digital video, 8:30 min.
- Peggy and Fred in Hell [excerpts]. 1984–2015. 16mm and video transferred to digital video, 8 min.
- The Fold. 2012/2023. Digital video, 4:30 min.
- Cut from Liquid to Snake. 2018. Digital video, 26 min.
- Ground. 2020. Digital video, 13:30 min.
- Untitled [work in progress]. 2024. Digital video, 5 min.
- High Heel Beloved. 2021. Digital video, 4:30 min.