NYAB Event - Owen Land Exhibition

Owen Land Exhibition

Essex Street

This event has ended.

ESSEX STREET presents the first individual gallery exhibition of Owen Land’s work in America.

P. Adams Sitney wrote about Owen Land, in the pages of Artforum last year, upon the filmmaker’s untimely death; “From the start, Land was unique in his subjects and in his relationship to the processes of filmmaking. Television, advertisements, linguistic confusions were the materials of his first films, and they remained his favorite subjects. Above all he used cinema as a means to explore the illusory nature of images.
…
Land’s unique contribution was to focus on the detritus of television and advertisement as the signatura rerum – the more banal, the more spiritually immanent.
…

Although Land’s films of the second half of the ‘60s… were among the earliest, most profound, and most influential instances of what I later identified as “structural film,” he never tired of satirizing the idea of that mode of filmmaking or his role in advancing it.”

ESSEX STREET will be showing three works, Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc, 1965-1966; Undesirables, 1999; and his final film Dialogues, 2009.

George Landow, who rearranged his name to Owen Land sometime in the late 1970s, was born in Connecticut, USA in 1944. He studied drawing, painting, sculpture, and industrial design at Pratt Institute, Art Student’s League of New York, and New York Academy of Art. He later studied acting and improvisation at Goodman Drama School and Second City, Chicago. He graduated with an MFA in painting from New York Academy of Art in 1993. His music studies include classical and Flamenco guitar; classical piano and composition; Indian vocal and instrumental music at the Ali
Akbar Kahn College of Music in San Rafael, California. He taught at School of the Art Institute of Chicago,
Northwestern University, San Francisco Art Institute, and Art Center College of Design, Pasadena California. He founded the Experimental Theatre Workshop at The Art Institute of Chicago.

Recent individual exhibitions of his work were held at Kunsthalle Bern, Bern; Kunstwerke, Berlin; Office Baroque, Antwerp and Moderna Museet, Malmö.

Retrospectives of Owen Land's films have been held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Edinburgh Film Festival in Scotland, The American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria New York, The Rotterdam International Film Festival in the Netherlands, The Tate Gallery in London, Anthology Film Archives and in collaboration with Lux, London and Filmmuseum Austria, Vienna.

A monograph on Land’s work “Dialogues”- A film By Owen Land was published by Kunsthalle Bern, Bern and Paraguay Press, Paris in 2010. An earlier monograph Two Films by Owen Land was published in 2006 and edited by Mark Webber, who was instrumental in restoring interest to Land’s work. The films of Owen Land are preserved by Filmmuseum Austria, Vienna.