"Dreamful Slumbers" Exhibition
Microscope Gallery
This event has ended.
Dreamful Slumbers: Drawings and Video, the first New York solo exhibition of the filmmaker and artist James Fotopoulos, featuring over 80 charcoal drawings made between 2008 to 2011 and new video works. The title relates to a line in William Blake’s creation myth The Book of Urizen (1794) and the exhibit marks Fotopoulos’ serious return to drawing, a practice he began in his youth.
Fotopoulos, who was featured at the Whitney Biennial and at MoMA in the mid-2000s, made the works in Dreamful Slumbers during a period “fueled by a disinterest in many modes of current art production I found myself either tangled in or standing too close too = like standing too close to a fire.” This was a time of intense artistic introspection during which Fotopoulos felt “…that if I couldn’t succeed in harnessing these images and emotions using those methods (turning my back on all the current technology which I had been absorbed in), then I should stop making work.” That Fotopoulos had by already made over 100 films and videos ranging from features to under 30 seconds only emphasizes the gravity of this statement.
Dreamful Slumbers traces the development of Fotopoulos’ current works in (primarily) charcoal – which contain imagery of animals, bodies, personal symbols from youth, and letters and words as a personal codes of memories and dreams – starting with simple black & white images, to a longer period of experimentation with reds, to a sudden focus on blue. Additionally, drawings made for several recent moving images work, including the short Thick Comb and the features Chimera and Alice in Wonderland, which premiered at Microscope last May, are also presented and offer a comment on the relationship between art made by a filmmaker to the “art” made for a film.
A new short video on installation, Wellness, made with drawings and Fotopoulos’ unique animation techniques brings to the forefront the discussion and connection between drawing and making moving images, a subject that has interested Fotopoulos since as early as 2005 when he was quoted in the New York Times as saying “With digital, I can work like I draw – it’s that free.” With a series of his just completed works titled “Blue”, Fotopoulos has completely and successfully bound the two, making a work in two parts: a drawing and a 15 to 20 second video.
Media
Schedule
from January 07, 2012 to February 06, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-01-07 from 18:00 to 21:00