50th Ann Arbor Film Festival Events
The Ann Arbor Film Festival is the longest-running independent and experimental film festival in North America, established in 1963. Internationally recognized as a première forum for independent filmmakers and artists, each year’s festival engages audiences with remarkable cinematic experiences. The six-day festival presents 40 programs, panels and parties with nearly 200 films from over 20 countries of all lengths and genres, including experimental, animation, documentary, narrative, hybrid and performance based works. As part of the 50th Anniversary programming, the School of Art & Design is hosting installations by Leighton Pierce and Phil Solomon at Slusser Gallery and Work: Ann Arbor.
Leighton Pierce: Threshold of Peripheral Induction
March 26 — April 2
Slusser Gallery, Art & Architecture Building — 2000 Bonisteel Blvd, Ann Arbor MI, 48109
PLEASE NOTE: Pierce provides an artist talk Friday, March 30th at 3pm in Slusser Gallery
Pierce’s installation creates an environment for proto-narratives. The imagined camera constantly moves as if an entity through real yet abstracted space. Small events occur, yet a plot never takes hold. This is the proto-narrative – events seem to be linked in time and across space, but likely outcomes are never encouraged.
Through specific arrangement of a “U” shaped projection object, Pierce has made it impossible to see more than two projected images at once. The observer must continually change their viewing position — a move which simultaneously eliminates some images from view. The purposeful lack of an ideal viewing position forces an engagement with memory and forgetting as the observer integrates visual, aural, and spatial impressions into an internal shifting coherence.
The images themselves are both beautiful and uncanny. The bulk of the material was shot in natural light at night, much of it in a rural setting away from most artificial light sources. Pierce shot thousands of handheld long-exposure digital stills that he later wove into video “shots.” He moved the camera during each of these long (several seconds in most cases) exposures, painting with the low light and strange color shifts of night onto the image sensor. In these images, both the light of night and the markers of time due to intentional motion blur create a sense of familiar strangeness.
Pierce’s process of shooting embodied an attentional effect, which he continued to explore throughout the editing and arrangement of the finished piece. The difficulty of capturing handheld moving stills to be later animated into video, forced an attention to kinesthetic memory while shooting. Each hour long “shoot” (required to gather material for a one or two minute shot) was a continuous dance with the camera. Coupled with the necessary live calculations of simultaneous time streams (1 — each exposure’s duration and the unnaturally slow movement required to shoot in this stop-motion manner and 2 — the anticipated duration and temporal flow of the completed video shot), this created a production environment in which he could embed a quality of attention into the process of making itself, from the very first moment.
http://aafilmfest.org/50/events/50-screens/threshold/
Phil Solomon: American Falls
March 25 — April 2
Work Gallery, 306 State Street Ann Arbor, MI 48104
Hours: Tuesday through Saturday: Noon — 7 pm, Closed Sunday/Monday.
PLEASE NOTE: Solomon will be in attendance for a program dedicated to his films on Friday, March 30th
An epic cross-examination of 20th Century American history, begins with an image of Annie Edson Taylor, who became the first person to survive a plunge over Niagara Falls in a barrel in 1901. The idea of “falling,” both literal and metaphorical, becomes the guiding concept of this three-channel installation, as Solomon applies his trademark “image alchemy” (a process that involves applying chemical solutions to film emulsion) to images that somehow seem conjured from the collective unconscious. Begun at the dawn of the Bush era and com- pleted as Obama took office, American Falls is a magisterial, meticulous survey of the promise and failure of a cracked American dream. — John Powers
http://aafilmfest.org/50/events/50-screens/americanfalls/