Microscope Gallery is very pleased to present The World is a Picture of the World, the second solo exhibition at the gallery by Jeanne Liotta, featuring a new body of work incorporating drawing, collage, photography and projection that are inspired by and often include among their materials 20th Century NASA 35mm slides of the universe that were frequently offered in planetarium and other similar gift shops.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese filmmakers and artists disrupted the status quo with happenings, performances, events and political protests. The boundaries of art film were also expanded considerably. Julian Ross, an expert on the Japanese avantgarde, will talk about this underexposed history.

From appropriation of dominant cinematic archives, to critical scrutiny of film techniques, the 12 modern and contemporary artists' works presented in this program exemplify an alternative and highly self-reflective form of cinema. Following Erika Balsom’s understanding of contemporary art as a potential “laboratory for film, a place in which its social, technological and aesthetic history can be picked over and recycled,” they reconsider what cinema is (or was) and what it can do. With an emphasis on the ideology behind the operation of filmic apparatus and the technological externalization of memory and time, the works in this program expose critical and aesthetic potentials of “an other cinema,” oscillating between white cube and black box.