Kerry Laitala: Conjured Pictures [1]
Films, video & live performance Followed by Q&A w/ the artist
Microscope is very pleased to welcome San Francisco-based artist Kerry Laitala to the gallery for an evening of her 16mm films, the New York premieres of a new video City Blights as well as a 16mm film performance in three parts titled Astro Trilogy.
Engaged with the alchemical properties of film and pre-cinematic approaches to making, activating and altering images, Laitala’s works in the program – completed between 2000 and 2017 – often present uncanny abstract compositions of fast-moving and mesmerizing colors combined with found or original footage. Each formal intervention stems from a precise conceptual underpinning: in Conquered, cracks of light and emulsion against a dark background evoke the snow covered boy of Everest mountaineer George Mallory; in Orbit the mis-registered images caused by a lab mistake are intensified through an optical printing process; and the visual elements of Conjuror’s Box are impressed onto the filmstrip through photogram techniques hinting at the early magical ties and illusory machinery of cinema.
With sound by Wobbly, Laitala’s latest multi-projector film performance Astro Trilogy consists of three thematic sections: Velvet of Night with imagery drawn from ancient astronomy, Chromatic Wheels inspired by the history of early public lighting and the choreographed spotlight shows by Walter D’Arcy Ryan, and The Kali of Technology in which intensely merge “female-energy-infused” images.
The artist, who has been working with moving image since the 90s, today has a quite large and unique body of work comprised of videos, installations, expanded cinema performances, and a series of hybrid film/video investigations of Chromadepth 3D technology.
Laitala will be in attendance and available for Q&A after the screening.
General admission $8 Members and students w/ ID $6
_ Kerry Laitala is a media archaeologist whose works spans the territories of photography and expanded cinema performances to 3D single channel videos and sculptural installation. Laitala’s work synthesizes ideas and ephemera from the realms of science, history, and technology. Laitala has won two Golden Gate Awards from the San Francisco International Film Festival, was awarded the Princess Grace Award for film in 1996 and PGF’s Special Grant in 2004, 2007, 2015 and 2016. She studied photography and film at the Massachusetts College of Art and received her Master’s degree in film from the San Francisco Art Institute. She lives and works in San Francisco, CA.
Full program available at www.microscopegallery.com [3]
Category:
- Screenings [4]
Dates:
Venue:
Microscope Gallery [5]
Microscope Gallery was founded in 2010 by artists and curators Elle Burchill and Andrea Monti and is located in the Bushwick area of Brooklyn, NY. The gallery specializes in the works of moving image, sound, digital and performance artists - from the emerging to pioneers of their art forms - through exhibitions and weekly events. Microscope addresses the unnecessary divide between the white box setting of the gallery and black box of the screening/performance venue. It was conceived as a place where artists working with these time-based arts can show their works in one or the other or both contexts according to their artistic intent. Alongside its regular exhibition schedule, Microscope presents a weekly event series complementing and expanding the curatorial programming through screenings, performance, readings and lectures. From its original micro-sized 4 Charles Place location, in September 2014 the gallery moved to a larger space at 1329 Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn NY.
In 2021 Microscope relocated to its current space at 525 West 29th Street in New York.