Anita Thacher
Loose Corner
December 16, 2021 – January 29, 2022
Opening Thursday December 16, 6-9pm
Press:
The New Yorker, by Johanna Fateman
Installation Views
Checklist
Microscope is very pleased to present Loose Corner, the third solo exhibition at the gallery of works by Anita Thacher (d. 2017). Loose Corner concentrates on an eponymous 16mm film installation, begun in 1980 and completed in 1986, employing surrealistic sensibilities and optical illusions created with analog film printing techniques to address everyday life and dreams within the domestic realm. A selection of associated photographs from a 1980 series created with optical processes, stage sets and cast of characters similar to those in the film is also on view. The exhibition follows the 16mm film component’s preservation by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences this year.
In “Loose Corner,” as in Kafka and Buñuel, everything looks simple, nothing is. To realize, in shock and high adventure, that we cannot “even” depend on our sense organs and customary ways of perceiving the world around us, confronts us with the imperative need to open ourselves to new visions and to let the opulent magic of a universe more complex than hitherto imagined, enter our unsuspectedly famished bodies. — Amos Vogel, May 1987
For the first time, “Loose Corner,” which debuted in the exhibition “Film as Installation” at the Clocktower in New York in 1980 as a work-in-progress, is shown as an installation as originally conceived with analog rear projection of the 16mm film within the gallery space. (The film in a theatrical version premiered at the opening of the 1986 New York Film Festival and has been screened throughout the years). Described as a “comedy of sabotage” in her original concept notes, the installation involves a life-sized projection of a corner of a room onto a wall-sized screen intersecting an actual room corner to create a trompe l’oeil illusion. “Because of this congruence, the film ‘steals’ the three-dimensional formation for itself and ‘pretends’ to have physical presence,” Thacher writes.
The corner — a typically uninteresting and overlooked area of a room — becomes a site for various real and fantastical activities. Main characters — a woman, man, child and dog — and various objects such as a black and white cube and a red, white & blue ball materialize on screen in their real-life dimensions, but soon begin to shrink and grow, duplicate and engage with one another and other versions of themselves, often changing degrees of opacity and materiality. As the film progresses, the environment shifts as well. The bland corner with unadorned walls takes on the resemblance of a large container with a glass lid, of a beaker filling with bluish-green water, and of a sparkling sea or of a star-filled sky. Like the most skillful magical trick, but performed through the means of cinema, each action leads to the realistic manifestation of the surreal.
“Subjects and objects appear in the corner film in altered and unaltered states, massacring our assumptions and liberating our perceptual beliefs.” — Anita Thacher
The related photographs on view are selections from a series made in early 1980 through optical printing processes that like the film involve the layering of multiple images, eventually resulting in a single picture in which the rules of space, time and gravity are defied.
In the photographs, the characters of boy and dog are played by the same actors as those that appear in the final film, while the role of young woman is played by the artist Francesca Woodman, a friend and neighbor of Thacher’s who lived across the hall at the time. The character of the man does not appear in the photographs, which were completed prior to the initial test shooting of the film later that year.
Loose Corner opens on Thursday December 16th, 6-9pm, 2021 and continues through January 29th, 2022.
Opening Reception: Thursday December 16th, 6-9pm. (Proof of full Covid-19 vaccination and masks are required for the opening). Gallery Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 12-6pm. Address: 525 W. 29th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10001.
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Anita Thacher (d. 2017) was a New York artist working in multiple mediums including painting, moving image, light, installation, photography, and public art, among others. Her practice frequently addresses issues of spatial and personal perception, memory, and the domestic realm. Her work has previously exhibited at institutions including The Whitney Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Kitchen, New York, NY; The Sculpture Center, New York, NY; Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York, NY; MoMA PS1, Long Island, Queens, NY; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Contemporary Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; and Jeu de Paume, Paris, France, among many others and screened widely throughout the US and abroad. Her work has been reviewed in Afterimage, Artforum, ARTnews, The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Washington Post, Newsday, The Miami Herald, and many others.
Her work recently entered the permanent art collection of the Guggenheim Museum and her films are in the public collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Cinémathèque Française, Paris, France; among others. Grants and awards include those from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the National Endowment of the Arts, Ford Foundation, American Film Institute, and French Minister of Culture, to name a few. Thacher was the inaugural recipient of the Martin E. Segal Award of Lincoln Center, a MacDowell Colony Fellow and former Board Member, and a Civitella Ranieri Fellow.
Special thanks to Mark Toscano, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
