IN CINEMA
An Evening with Bill Brand
Friday, September 22 at 7PM
Tickets: $15 General Admission/$7 Reduced Price
Multi-media artist Bill Brand’s masterfully complex and recently restored 16mm film Coalfields (1984) weaves documentary content into a kinetic abstract visual poem about black lung disease, landscape and a struggle for worker’s rights in West Virginia. The film features the commissioned poetry of Kimiko Hahn and music of Earl Howard. Brand will show Coalfields along with other more recent films and give a brief presentation that connects his moving image work to his paintings and drawings while tracing his journey with analog and digital mediums from the 1970’s to the present. He will explain the optical printing techniques he innovated for Coalfields and discuss ideas that inform his unique visual language.
Bill Brand is known for his public artwork Masstransiscope, an animated mural in the New York City subway on the Q and B line in Brooklyn. He is also a widely respected film preservationist and educator. His artwork is represented in Paris by Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre and in Brooklyn by Court Tree Collective.
Coalfields (1984) 16mm, 38 minutes
West Virginia industrial landscapes are collaged on an optical printer through a series of jagged shapes that transform the photographed scenes into a semi-abstract kinetic field. Woven into the fabric of the film is the story of Fred Carter, a retired coal miner and black lung activist who was framed by the Federal Government in its effort to undercut the black lung movement and to stop his bid for president of the United Mine Workers Association. His story is told through fragments of documentary interviews and by a poet whose narrative forms a counter theme within the film. The film’s thematic content and formal visualizations sit in precarious balance. Poem by Kimiko Hahn, Music by Earl Howard.
Susie’s Ghost (2011) 16mm, 7 minutes
Susie’s Ghost is about the mystery of the marks we make and leave behind. The “Susie” in the title refers to a deceased sibling but the "ghost" refers more generally to lingering feelings of loss. The cinematography and performance both express a tentative presence and diffuse sense of disappearance. Is she looking for something? Is she really there? The film was shot with aging 16mm film in filmmaker’s downtown Manhattan neighborhood, just before construction mania obliterated the last traces of the manufacturing district he’d moved into years earlier. Made in collaboration with Ruthie Marantz.
August Garden (2019) Digital, 4 1/2 minutes
August Garden was made for a Turtle exhibition organized in Paris by Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre. Turtle is a series of pop-up exhibitions conceptualized by the late artist Michael H. Shamberg who wished to create an ongoing, inclusive mobile sanctuary for artists. The Turtle name was inspired by a turtle sanctuary that emerged between two warring zones in the Middle East. August Garden forms a placid zone from colliding layers and views, celebrating the late summer sanctuary of the garden adjacent to filmmaker’s home in Queens, New York.
Ornithology 6 (2021) Digital, 8 1/2 minutes
This is the latest in a series of short digital video works extending the visual idiom that Brand developed with analog film and optical printing in the 1970s and 80s. Ornithology 6 is part of an ongoing series of painting, drawing and moving image works inspired by daily walks taken by the artist in his Jackson Heights, Queens neighborhood. The video is made for continuous loop presentation.
Bill Brand is a multi-disciplinary artist whose films, public artwork, installations, painting and works-on-paper have exhibited worldwide in museums, galleries, microcinemas and on television. His 1980 Masstransiscope, an animated mural installed in the New York City subway, is in the MTA Arts and Design permanent collection. Bill Brand’s artwork has been featured at Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum,Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, Anthology Film Archive and Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art. His work is represented in Paris by Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre and in Brooklyn by Court Tree Collective. His films have been presented at major film festivals including the Berlin Film Festival, New Directors/ New Films, Tribeca Film Festival and Rotterdam Film Festival, (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periférico, Light Field (San Francisco) and Prismatic Ground Film Festival (New York.)
