Jenny Perlin Exhibition
Simon Preston Gallery
This event has ended.
Simon Preston Gallery presents the third solo exhibition by Jenny Perlin.
The exhibition is comprised of two new films and an installation of works on paper. Perlin’s multi-part projects have previously drawn on her interest in literature, history and perception. Working with and against the documentary tradition, Perlin incorporates innovative stylistic techniques in film, sound and drawing to underscore issues of both personal and collective history.
For The Long Sleepers, Perlin takes Jules Verne’s 1877 novel “The Child of the Cavern, or Strange Doings Underground” as a point of departure. In the chapter titled “A Sunrise,” Verne describes with great precision and beauty the colors of the sky and sun, as if relating the experience directly to someone who has never seen the illuminated sky. Those are Stars is a 16mm film made in cooperation with film lab technicians using a rare tinting technique called the Desmet process. The technicians tinted the film according to Perlin’s predetermined color palette derived from images of a sunrise’s progress in the Scottish landscape where Verne’s novel takes place. The resulting film, a reduction of line and color, radiates hues that shift through rich metaphoric imagery: pulleys, ladders, horizon lines that rise into the sky, arrows that freeze mid-air and mountains that sink below ground.
The accompanying film, The Crystal King, takes an analogue journey through the Ohio Caverns, a subterranean landscape of slowly growing stalactites and stalagmites. Unlike the frozen sculptures melting throughout the gallery, The Crystal King reveals time passing at a radically different rate than on the earth’s surface. The exhibition also presents Long Sleepers, an installation of over 400 works on paper. Perlin rotates through the 16mm film, selecting individual frames to draw in silver and cyan ink, creating chance correspondences among the accumulation of images.
Jenny Perlin is currently included in the exhibition Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905 – 2016 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. On February 1, as part of the museum’s public programs, Perlin presents The Blooming Colors, a new performance in collaboration with pianist Adam Marks, exploring the connection between music and color. Using three different scales drawn from the history of the color organ, Marks translates Perlin’s silent film Twilight Arc, 2016, (currently on view in the exhibition) into music. For the performance, Perlin has created new visuals that explore refraction, transparency, mirroring and synesthesia. LINK
Jenny Perlin (b. 1970, Massachusetts) currently lives and works in Brooklyn. She received her BA from Brown University in Literature and Society, her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Film, and postgraduate studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York. Her films have been shown at numerous venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; MoMA, New York; New York Film Festival, New York; the Drawing Center, New York; The Kitchen, New York; Mass MoCA, Massachusetts; Guangzhou Triennial, Canton: IFC Center, New York, Berlin and Rotterdam film festivals; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona, among others.
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Schedule
from January 08, 2017 to February 19, 2017
Opening Reception on 2017-01-08 from 18:00 to 20:00