Roger Beebe: Films for One to Eight Projectors [1]
Microscope Gallery is pleased to welcome back to the gallery Columbus-based filmmaker Roger Beebe for an evening of films, videos, and multi-projector performances, including several New York premieres shown alongside some of his best-known works. The event is the New York leg of Beebe’s 3,000-mile East Coast tour. The program has been adapted to include only works never before presented at the gallery.
In his works, Beebe often reflects upon forms of technology that are disappearing, or potentially being replaced – text fonts, books, moving image mediums, real estate – and critically considers their infrastructures and “replacements”, such as Amazon.com’s fulfillment centers in his 2018 “Amazonia” (NY Premiere) or the new high rises of Las Vegas, now the US city with the largest rate of suicide, in “Money Changes Everything” (2010).
Beebe’s 2015 performance work for six 16mm projectors “SOUNDFILM” presents a usually unseen history of sound and its recording, focusing on its visual translation on the film strip and measuring instruments, as sound to be seen on screen. His seven projector “Last Light of a Dying Star” (2008-2011), originally conceived for a planetarium, through meticulously juxtaposed original and found footage reveals how light, space, celluloid film, early space explorations, expanded cinema, and ephemerality are intertwined.
Beebe will be available for Q&A following the screening and performance.
Roger Beebe’s work since 2006 consists primarily of multiple projector performances that explore the world of found images and the “found” landscapes of late capitalism. He has screened his films around the globe at such unlikely venues as the CBS Jumbotron in Times Square and McMurdo Station in Antarctica as well as more likely ones including Sundance and the Museum of Modern Art with solo shows at Anthology Film Archives, The Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City, and Los Angeles Filmforum among many other venues. Beebe is also a film programmer: he ran Flicker, a festival of small-gauge film in Chapel Hill, NC, from 1997-2000 and was the founder and Artistic Director of FLEX, the Florida Experimental Film/Video Festival from 2004-2014. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Art at the Ohio State University.
Category:
- Screenings [3]
Dates:
Venue:
Microscope Gallery [4]
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.