Elaine Buckholtz Spinning “Light For Color Fields”
Sasha Wolf Gallery
This event has ended.
Elaine Buckholtz has been working with aspects of moving light for the past 30 years. This exhibition focuses on light sculpture, video installation and manipulated video stills. The works produced for this show are made up of two different, yet related, ways of working.
Firstly, the manipulated video stills - or photographic prints - from Buckholtz’s experimentation with iconic works from art history. She tears out images from art history books, then takes the excised images and spins them on a contraption of her own design. She then films these pieces in motion while shaking the camera, and the footage results in abstracted lines and patterns. The finished prints are video stills of these spun artworks.
Adding another layer to this process, Buckholtz also projects a video of the spinning pieces on to prints of the video stills. These meditative, quiet pieces are the result of still images with their slow-motion counterpart video projected on to the extracted prints. The two video projections pieces in the show are formatted in the aspect ratio of two important moments in film history. The first of these, “Middlesticks,” is a 1:1 (or square) format; the format of Étienne-Jules Marey’s films, one of the earliest forms of recorded moving image (Marey’s Chronophotographe recorded the famous images proving cats always land on their feet). The second, “Spinning Night in Living Color,” uses the iconic Cinemascope format (anywhere from 2.66:1 to 2.35:1), a format at once familiar and nostalgic (see “East of Eden”, and “The Inn of The Sixth Happiness”). These pieces address not only the history of painting (through source material of images from textbooks), but also the history of cinema (through format and the use of moving image). Through these pieces, the act of painting is reconsidered and leapfrogs from planar painting (second dimension) to time-based media (the fourth dimension).
For Buckholtz, who is also known for her longstanding career as a light installation artist and lighting designer for performance, this body of work sits in the context of distilling the variables involved with lighting a 3D space for time-based performance into a gallery setting. The cohesive connectors between these practices are motion, light, time, and an interest in harnessing these elements in an art-historical context.
Buckholtz has shown work at Proof Gallery (Boston, MA), Souzy Tros (Athens, Greece), In the Backyard Stories Festival (Batumi, Georgia), The Lumiere Festival (Derry, Ireland), Electric Works (San Francisco,CA), Sonoma Valley Museum (Sonoma, CA), The Swiss Technorama Museum (Winterthur Switzerland), Yerba Buena Center For The Arts (San Francisco, CA), The Claremont Museum (Claremont, CA), Pierogi Leipzig (Leipzig, Germany), The Luggage Store (San Francisco, CA),The San Francisco Arts Commission (San Francisco, CA), California College of The Arts (San Francisco, CA), Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA), The Wexner Center For The Arts (Columbus, OH), Sun Valley Center For The Arts (Sun Valley, ID), and Fusion Art Space (San Francisco, CA).
Media
Schedule
from June 03, 2015 to July 12, 2015
Opening Reception on 2015-06-03 from 18:00 to 20:00