Monday June 10, 7:30pm
Abigail Child
Silent Films (1977-79)
Artist in person

Still from “Peripeteia I” (1977) by Abigail Child – Image courtesy of the artist

We are very pleased to present a rare screening of early films by Abigail Child, a fixture in New York’s avant-garde film and writing community since the 1980s with around 50 films completed to date.

Child is perhaps most known as a formidable collagist of cutouts of images and sounds into densely edited moving image works often merging formal, feminist, and political concerns, while including artistic contributions of friends and collaborators such as poetry, music, and acting. Silent Films focuses on six early, silent works most of which have not been shown in nearly 30 years. All were made in San Francisco between 1977-79 prior to her move to New York City and represent her first filmic outburst as an independent filmmaker, following her work as a commercial documentary filmmaker.

From an interview with poet Charles Bernstein:

“CB: […] So go back to your first [experimental] film. What was the conception in editing it?

AC: Well, that might be Some Exterior Presence. I had four elements sourced from a documentary on radical nuns that I had edited. It was the last commercial directorial job I did. The women were terrific, and the film was “adequate” with a formula of a half-hour TV documentary: do it in three weeks from start to airdate. Wanting to be more authentic to these women and their spirit, I took some of the work print, and I looked through it; and I was interested, as an editor, in the possibilities that the film could go forward, it could go backward, it could be flipped, and it could be upside down.”

In addition to Some Exterior Presence (1977), the program includes: two striking depictions of nature and light on celluloid Peripeteia I and Peripeteia II, shot by the artist in Oregon’s rainforest, alone and without electricity; Pacific Far East Line, filmed out of her apartment window facing downtown San Francisco and approached by the artist similarly to a painted composition; and Ornamentals, a film consisting of unrelated fragments organized according to the color spectrum in which Child begins to consider “ways to structure work” and the possibilities inherent in the cut.

All work will be shown in their original 16mm film format. Child will be attendance and a Q&A follows the screening.

General admission $8
Students & Members $6

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Abigail Child has been at the forefront of experimental media and writing since the 1980s, having completed more than thirty film/video works and 6 books, five of poetry and one of criticism. Her works have exhibited among others at The Museum of Modern Art, NY; Block Museum of Art, Illinois; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Oregon; The Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Wellin Museum, New York; Maccarone Gallery, NYC; LACE, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Museum of Image and Sound, Brazil; Greater New York Show at P.S.1, MoMA; MACVAL, Museum d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne, France; Westbeth Gallery, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Hardy Tree Gallery, London UK; SF Museum of Modern Art; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF.

Her films and videos have been screened at the Whitney Biennial (1989, 1997) and shown worldwide at festivals including New York, Rotterdam, Barcelona, Pesaro, Seattle, Locarno and Edinburgh, among many others. She has had retrospectives in Tokyo at Image Forum, in Madrid at Museo Reina Sofia; at the Cineteca, Sala Trevi in Rome; in Argentina at BIM (Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento); Wakeforest University; and the Greek Cinematheque, Athens.

Awards include the Rome Prize, Radcliffe Institute, Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, and the Brakhage Vision Award. She has received grants from NYSCA, NYFA, the Asian Cultural Council, Mass Arts and the LEF Foundation. Harvard University Cinematheque has created an “Abigail Child Collection” which will preserve and exhibit her art. Child was born in Newark, New Jersey, and lives and works between New York City and Nova Scotia.

Program:

Some Exterior Presence
by Abigail Child, 16mm film, color, silent, 1977, 9 minutes

Cut between sessions on DLT, structured on the 4 handed nature of film: original footage — “outtakes” from a television documentary I had directed in the spring of 1975 in South Bronx and Brownsville boroughs of New York City — manipulated, then optically printed, then manipulated again.

“The hands are at once linear — the parallel fingers moving across the table as though measuring lengths of film — as well as rounded and expressive, almost touching by the end of the work. These two extremes are somehow mediated by the figure in the white suit who forever undergoes the ritual of entering a dark doorway with linear slats of light. He stands or moves somewhere between these two domains: the exterior linear world and the other world which it houses, where exists the presence of softness and the possibility of touch…” — Linda Dackman, Cinemanews 1977

Peripeteia I
by Abigail Child, 16mm film, color, silent, 1977, 10 minutes

A landscape movie, filmed while living in the Oregon coastal rain forest, fall 1976. A digressive attendance contrasting the camera’s fixed sight with in-site movement. Navigation spiraling sunwards.

Peripeteia II
by Abigail Child, 16mm film, color, silent, 1978, 10 minutes

Returning to and extending from Peripeteia I, a navigation by light, again contrasting the camera’s fixed sight with “in site” movement. A sculpture of glass, mirrors and film vies with the choreography of the cardinal points: dense shelter, rain, red emulsion. Filmed in the Oregon Coastal forest, June 1977.

Daylight Test Section
by Abigail Child, 16mm film, color, silent, 1978, 4 minutes

Recurring emergence of narrative. The “loaded” image becomes the determinant feature for reading otherwise unemotional footage; a first experiment in what is an ongoing investigation.

Pacific Far East Line 
by Abigail Child, 16mm film, color, silent, 1979, 12 minutes

A second landscape film, in this case urban. The work constructed from materials gathered over two years looking out at downtown San Francisco from a loft on Folsom Street. The elements are “folded” and mixed, Time redefines Space: the erector and helicopter appear as toys within a schizy motor-oil-ized ballet mechanique.

Ornamentals
by Abigail Child, 16mm film, color, silent, 1979, 10 minutes

In North Indian classical singing, the approach (up or down) to the note; also the bushes with red berries that grow in Northern California. Footage gathered over many years organized along the color spectrum in a structure of expansion. The concern is abstraction, surfacing representation, increasing connotation through what repeats in time and what is seen — shocks stretched on impressions’ edge to undermine habit. The film was crucial to my understanding of composition, to my desire for an encyclopedic construction (the world out there) and reaffirmed my allegiance to rhythm.

“Juxtapositions of light made this dream consumed image between the penny arcades & mirrors reflecting masturbating naked brain of magnetized nitrous screens crackling is like pulp beside dummy circumstance.” — Bruce Andrews, Jimmy and Lucy’s House of K

“the rhythm!!!! The rhythm like jazz, comes out of & returns to the body (the animal nature of film! illustrated by the organic reticulations, patterns of the self-processed segments); the meanings of the shots constantly undermined thru highly intentional overload…all “films are different every viewing” but this one more specifically so…” — Henry Hills, Cinemanews

Still from “Pacific Far East Line” (1979) by Abigail Child – Image courtesy of the artist

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Microscope Gallery Event Series 2019 is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).