Lewis Klahr
17 Jan - 22 Feb 2014
LEWIS KLAHR
Sixty Six
17 January – 22 February 2014
Anthony Reynolds Gallery is proud to announce the first solo gallery presentation of the work of acclaimed film maker Lewis Klahr, one of the most important and original experimental film makers working today.
Klahr's collage films have always mimed the processes of memory by pulling together the discards of contemporary life (images from ads, text books, or comic books, objects such as game pieces, menus, playing cards) into scenarios that seem like some Hollywood film dimly remembered... Instead of characters, Klahr gives us the play of enigmatic spaces and empty sites that promise both the invitation of desire and the discovery of crime. (Tom Gunning) Klahr's great subject is time, which certainly explains the exquisitely melancholy tone that pervades his work. He traffics in modes that are pitched just beyond the realm of reason. Somewhere between waking and sleeping, we can find that wavelength and achieve understanding only to have it slip away as we enter one state or the other.(Chris Stults, Wexner Center for the Arts)
Anthony Reynolds Gallery is premiering the first three episodes of Klahr’s latest film work, SixtySix. Klahr is a collagist and reanimator; he rescues, collects, collates, adjusts fragmentary images into miniature tableaux which are seized, shot by shot, with a 35mm digital still camera and built painstakingly into complex and evocative sequences operating in time and space. Alongside these new films we will be showing a large number of the still images from which the films are made; images, each of which stand alone as a dream weaver and signifier of imaginative threads.
Klahr, writing about this new work, says: “Sixty Six has kept growing throughout 2013. I can now glimpse the contours of a 12 episode series that is a mythopoetic splice of mid 60’s daylight film noir and Greek mythology. The scent of elliptical narrative lingers throughout, as vividly colored 60’s comic book figures thread their way through iconic photographic settings that are often blackandwhite and often of midtwentieth century Los Angeles. It’s a pop associational mindscape where texture and eternal time are the favored intoxicants. It’s my paradise lost. It’s a place that can’t exist yet always will.”
Klahr has been making films since 1977. His work has been screened extensively in the United States, Europe and Asia, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Biennial, the New York Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, the London Film Festival and the L.A. County Museum of the Arts. Klahr was awarded the Wexner Center for the Arts Media Arts Residency Award (2010) and the 2013 Stan Brakhage Vision Award, presented by the Denver Film Festival.
Klahr belongs to the lineage of filmmakers like Anger, Harrington, Kuchar, Warhol and Cornell. Artists who also had a profound understanding and affinity with Classical Hollywood while forging permanent departures through radical form. (Mark McElhatten,Curator Views From the Avante Garde, The NY Film Festival).
Klahr is an artist...who traffics in both pyschic scars and cultural remembrance (J Hoberman Village Voice)
Sixty Six
17 January – 22 February 2014
Anthony Reynolds Gallery is proud to announce the first solo gallery presentation of the work of acclaimed film maker Lewis Klahr, one of the most important and original experimental film makers working today.
Klahr's collage films have always mimed the processes of memory by pulling together the discards of contemporary life (images from ads, text books, or comic books, objects such as game pieces, menus, playing cards) into scenarios that seem like some Hollywood film dimly remembered... Instead of characters, Klahr gives us the play of enigmatic spaces and empty sites that promise both the invitation of desire and the discovery of crime. (Tom Gunning) Klahr's great subject is time, which certainly explains the exquisitely melancholy tone that pervades his work. He traffics in modes that are pitched just beyond the realm of reason. Somewhere between waking and sleeping, we can find that wavelength and achieve understanding only to have it slip away as we enter one state or the other.(Chris Stults, Wexner Center for the Arts)
Anthony Reynolds Gallery is premiering the first three episodes of Klahr’s latest film work, SixtySix. Klahr is a collagist and reanimator; he rescues, collects, collates, adjusts fragmentary images into miniature tableaux which are seized, shot by shot, with a 35mm digital still camera and built painstakingly into complex and evocative sequences operating in time and space. Alongside these new films we will be showing a large number of the still images from which the films are made; images, each of which stand alone as a dream weaver and signifier of imaginative threads.
Klahr, writing about this new work, says: “Sixty Six has kept growing throughout 2013. I can now glimpse the contours of a 12 episode series that is a mythopoetic splice of mid 60’s daylight film noir and Greek mythology. The scent of elliptical narrative lingers throughout, as vividly colored 60’s comic book figures thread their way through iconic photographic settings that are often blackandwhite and often of midtwentieth century Los Angeles. It’s a pop associational mindscape where texture and eternal time are the favored intoxicants. It’s my paradise lost. It’s a place that can’t exist yet always will.”
Klahr has been making films since 1977. His work has been screened extensively in the United States, Europe and Asia, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Biennial, the New York Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, the London Film Festival and the L.A. County Museum of the Arts. Klahr was awarded the Wexner Center for the Arts Media Arts Residency Award (2010) and the 2013 Stan Brakhage Vision Award, presented by the Denver Film Festival.
Klahr belongs to the lineage of filmmakers like Anger, Harrington, Kuchar, Warhol and Cornell. Artists who also had a profound understanding and affinity with Classical Hollywood while forging permanent departures through radical form. (Mark McElhatten,Curator Views From the Avante Garde, The NY Film Festival).
Klahr is an artist...who traffics in both pyschic scars and cultural remembrance (J Hoberman Village Voice)