“Every shot is the narrative and the narrative is every shot.” from “Devotional Cinema” by Nathaniel Dorsky

Peter Blum is pleased to announce an exhibition of photographic works by Nathaniel Dorsky. Film Stills is the first exhibition of the artist’s work at Peter Blum Gallery on view at 20 West 57th Street, New York. There will be an opening reception on Thursday November 19, from 6 to 8 p.m. The exhibition runs through January 9, 2016.

Nathaniel Dorsky’s photographs extract intimate moments of observation from his acclaimed silent films. This exhibition features a suite of 30 archival pigment prints that distill the poetic spatial layering of the films. If Dorsky’s films are like a waking dream, then the film stills are a memory of that dream—a crystallization of the meditative state achieved by the moving image and an absolute value by which to measure the fleetingness of our collective existence.

As the first exhibition dedicated to experimental Swiss cinema, Film Implosion! sheds light on a little known aspect of art history in Switzerland. It presents a wide panorama of genre practices within the medium of cinema more specifically, but also video work, from the 1960ʼs to today. Through formal interventions directly on the celluloid, various in-situ installations, unconventional documentaries, political, feminist, animated, and fiction films, all these artists challenged the traditional codes of cinema.

For the past four years, and with the help of the SNF (Swiss National Fund), researchers François Bovier, Adeena Mey, Fred Truniger, and Thomas Schärer have been investigating experimental cinema in Switzerland. From this considerable excavating and mapping work, stems Fri Artʼs proposal for the firstever exhibition on this subject.   For the most part unseen, some 70 artworks, in digital or 16-mm format and signed by artists ranging from Fredi M. Murer, Dieter Meier, Carole Roussopoulos, Dieter Roth, HHK Schoenherr, Hannes Schüpbach, or Peter Stämpfli will be shown. The exhibition will also include video works, installations, and para-filmic objects spanning 50 years of radical creativity.