NYAB Event - Jennifer West “One Mile Film”

Jennifer West “One Mile Film”

Lisa Cooley Fine Art

This event has ended.

Lisa Cooley presents One Mile Film, a distinguished work by artist Jennifer West. This is West’s first solo project with the gallery.

Originally commissioned by High Line Art, One Mile Film captures the park during the honeymoon of its transformation from a decommissioned railway into a verdant tourist attraction that would soon after integrate one of the city’s foremost cultural bastions, the Whitney Museum of American Art. The film was shot, altered, and projected on site in New York in 2012 and features images of rooftops, the skyline, construction, and destruction. Parts of the film also feature two New-York-based parkour traceurs performing in the restricted area of the High Line rail yards. It is particularly prescient that this film documents the construction of the Whitney’s new home and is being shown here in the city three years later on the heels of the museum’s recent reopening.

After processing footage recorded in June, West returned to the Highline in September 2012 and taped a full mile of her filmstrip to the length of the park spanning from Gansevoort Street to 34th Street. West transformed the High Line into an outdoor theatre with performances on and around the park, submitting her celluloid strip to spontaneous and guided interventions. During the performance the film was danced on by a group of school children, run over by joggers, walked on by tourists, written or scratched on by passersby, and otherwise suffused with dirt and grime from the day’s activity. Following this day-long performance, the distressed filmstrip was spliced together and transferred to high-definition digital video, the title of which underscores the process and people behind it:

One Mile Film (5,280 feet of 35mm film negative and print taped to the mile-long High Line walk way in New York City for 17 hours on Thursday, September 13th, 2012 with 11,500 visitors - the visitors walked, wrote, jogged, signed, drew, touched, danced, parkoured, sanded, keyed, melted popsicles, spit, scratched, stomped, left shoe prints of all kinds and put gum on the filmstrip - it was driven on by baby stroller and trash can wheels and was traced by art students - people wrote messages on the film and drew animations, etched signs, symbols and words into the film emulsion lines drawn down much of the filmstrip by visitors and Jwest with highlighters and markers - the walk way surfaces of concrete, train track steel, wood, metal gratings and fountain water impressed into the film; filmed images shot by Peter West - filmed Parkour performances by Thomas Dolan and Vertical Jimenez - running on rooftops by Deb Berman and Jwest - film taped, rolled and explained on the High Line by art students and volunteers)

Each frame of One Mile Film is a record of singular expression, given the diversity of participants who left their mark on the filmstrip. Abrupt, nonsensical, or profound; words, glyphs, and phrases like “Sex,” “Vote Obama,” “Seize the car,” and “Fear No Fullness” appear before the viewer, a visual manifestation of a sundry society that is bound together under West’s insouciant guidance. Performance, modernist gesture, and avant-garde filmmaking cohere to make this film more than just an imagistic impression of a moment in time. Each frame is a visual and material index of the memories and musings, both direct and indirect, of a population on their politics and environment, with a history told and preserved, but also reinvented.

Jennifer West was born in Topanga, California, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She holds degrees from the Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington, and the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California. Recent solo exhibitions include Focal Point Gallery, Essex, United Kingdom (2014); Marc Foxx, Los Angeles, California (2007, 2009, 2011, 2013, and 2014); S1 Artspace, Sheffield, United Kingdom (2012); Vilma Gold, London, United Kingdom (2008 and 2011); Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas (2010); Kunstverein Nurnberg, Germany (2010); Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, United Kingdom (2008); and White Columns, New York (2007).

West was a 2015 artist in residence at EMPAC, Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, and was an MIT List Visual Arts Center resident in 2011. Her work is included in numerous public collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California; the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio; the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, France, and San Francisco, California; the Saatchi Gallery, London, United Kingdom; the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, Florida; the Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Australia; the Zabludowicz Collection, London, United Kingdom; the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, Washington; and the Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, Washington. She will have a solo exhibition at Tramway, Glasgow, United Kingdom, in September 2016.

Media

• Film

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