Tag Archives: Martha Kirszenbaum

LIGIA LEWIS AT REDCAT

In MINOR MATTER—part two of her Blue, Red, and White trilogy that began with Sorrow Swag—dancer-choreographer Ligia Lewis and her dancers Jonathan Gonzalez and Tiran Willemse interrogate the color red as a medium between love and rage. 

“[With this piece] I knew that I was working specifically with a very strong relationship to space, so I wanted to animate the periphery as much as possible. I knew that I was trying to interrogate a certain type of body and a certain type of embodiment. I was also trying to play with duration, or at least with creating a relationship to time that had an articulation of memory, and the present, and a sort of posturing towards the future… happening simultaneously…

“I have a very contentious relationship with abstraction, at least in early notions of abstraction being ‘pure’ or unadulterated form, so I go in knowing that I’m not entirely going to get that, or maybe not entirely interested in it, but it’s an interesting place to start for me…

“I was thinking about marks and traces in space, which is me thinking through what it means to be a marked body on stage. How do you leave a mark or a trace?” — Ligia Lewis interview with Emily Gastineau

Returning to L.A. after a preview at Human Resources—see Evan Moffitt’s review—MINOR MATTER is presented as part of this month’s Pacific Standard Time Festival: Live Art LA/LA.

 

LIGIA LEWIS—MINOR MATTER

Friday and Saturday, January 12 and 13, at 8 pm.

Sunday, January 14, at 6 pm.

Redcat, 631 West 2nd Street, downtown Los Angeles.

See Hannah Black on Lewis.

See Martha Kirszenbaum, interview with Ligia Lewis, Kaleidoscope 29 (Spring 2017).

Above: Kaleidoscope 29 (Spring 2017), Ligia Lewis cover.

Below: Ligia Lewisminor matter. Photographs by Martha Glenn.

JENNIFER WEST — NEW WORK

“Pushing the manipulation of celluloid film to the level of performance,”* Jennifer West brings her new work to REDCAT this weekend for a one-night-only screening.

“With sensual, partly abstract, partly imagistic works that delve into how fiction weaves itself into our memories—and how our viewing experience has changed with the digital revolution,” the program features FILM TITLE POEM (2016), which West calls “a psychic montage of my inner history of film.” For this hour-long piece, “West re-shot more than 500 existing movie title cards on 35mm film and manipulated the print with etched patterns, scratches and punctures before transferring it to HD.”**

“A different kind of experimental film exists on the West Coast, but one of the things that people have done here is to deeply infiltrate, recycle, and use the underbelly of the Hollywood system.” — Jennifer West, PARIS LA*

 

JENNIFER WEST—FILM TITLE POEM AND OTHER WONDERS

REDCAT, DISNEY HALL, downtown Los Angeles

 

*Martha Kirszenbaum, “Jennifer West: Mind and Matter,” PARIS LA 10, Fall 2013, pp. 5, 10.

**Paragraph 2 quotes from: redcat.org/event/jennifer-west-film-title-poem-and-other-wonders

Jennifer West, Film Title Poem Image credit: Jennifer West and REDCAT

Jennifer West, Film Title Poem
Image credit: Jennifer West and REDCAT

 

Jennifer West, Film Title Poem and Other Wonders Image credit: Jennifer West and REDCAT

Jennifer West, Film Title Poem 
Image credit: Jennifer West and REDCAT

JENNIFER WEST: MIND AND MATTER

Nirvana Alchemy Film (16mm black & white film soaked in lithium mineral hot springs, pennyroyal tea, doused in mud, sopped in bleach, cherry antacid and laxatives – jumping by Finn West & Jwest), 2007, 2 minutes, 51 seconds, 16mm film negative transferred to digital video. [Courtesy of the artist and MARC FOXX, Los Angeles]

Nirvana Alchemy Film (16mm black & white film soaked in lithium mineral hot springs, pennyroyal tea, doused in mud, sopped in bleach, cherry antacid and laxatives – jumping by Finn West & Jwest), 2007, 2 minutes, 51 seconds, 16mm film negative transferred to digital video. [Courtesy of the artist and MARC FOXX, Los Angeles]

 Los Angeles-based artist Jennifer West grew up in Topanga Canyon in the 1970s before spending her college years in Seattle and Olympia during the early years of the Riot Grrrl and grunge movements. Inspired by West Coast subcultures, her organic films and printouts depict surfers, beach parties or natural phenomena that she captures on 16, 35 or 70 mm film before damaging its surface with the use of bodily, cosmetic or culinary fluids, thereby pushing the manipulation of celluloid film to the level of performance. The emulsion can be combined with perfume, alcohol, mascara, or pepper spray; the film can be scratched by a skateboard, kissed, or dragged in tar. She then uses this altered prime material to create projections of photographic prints, producing a sublime visceral action. 

In PARIS, LA #10, Jennifer West talks with curator and writer Martha Kirszenbaum about filmmaking, her artistic process, and her roots as a native Californian growing up with hippie parents on the coast. West’s exhibition ‘One Mile Film’ was recently on view at Marc Foxx gallery in Los Angeles in January, 2014.

 

Portrait of Jennifer West [photo by Martha Kirszenbaum]

Portrait of Jennifer West [photo by Martha Kirszenbaum]

PARIS, LA #10

PARISLA_10_NEWS

PARIS, LAISSUE #10 / FALL 2013

SPECIAL ART ISSUEFRANCE X LOS ANGELES

 

CONTENTS

Jennifer West: Mind and Matter | By Martha Kirszenbaum

Portfolio Ceci n’est pas… | By Sébastien Paquet

Celui qu’elle espérait | By Neil Beloufa

How to Build a House | Jorge Pardo in conversation with Oscar Tuazon

Lost in Los Angeles | By Andrew Berardini

A Cento | By Public Fiction

The Importance of Being Unfinished | Sylvère Lotringer in conversation with Dorothée Perret

COVER | Michael Jackson Estates, 2013 by Pentti Monkkonen

CENTERFOLD | Chanel Winter 2013 Ad Campaign Remix by Pierre-François Letué