Leslie Thornton

Karl, a 70-year-old Austrian astronomer, is at a crossroads in life and work. After a conference in Greece, he decides not to return home and heads for a small island in hopes of finding a sky dark enough to reconnect with the stars.

This video materializes an intense phase of exchange between the artists who belong to two distinct generations and contexts. Thornton, a media artist who herself was influenced by Paul Sharits, Yvonne Rainer, and Joan Jonas often deploys projections complicated by ample sound-image interactions. Likewise, musical composition is key to Richard’s practice. Both artists’ work is motivated by their understanding of cinema and video as original languages and forms of thinking.

"Highly idiosyncratic and deeply creepy, this series as a whole – which includes passages in both film and video, sometimes shown concurrently – represents the most exciting recent work in the American avant-garde, a saga that raises questions about everything while making everything seem very strange." - Jonathan Rosenbaum

Two circles, twice the same image: a restless pool of simmering tar. The soundtrack also evokes hellish associations with an eyewitness report of atom bombs dropping on Japan. The abstract image and resigned voice of a nurse lift the factual information to a different level, as if we are looking at an MRI scan of someone’s thoughts.

In her eponymous film “Ground” (2020), Thornton outlines the coming into form of a reality in which the ground or base—like the ground of a painting or the physical ground that human existence has always been pulled toward by gravity—becomes undefined.

The first installment of Leslie Thornton's ongoing epic follows two children, Peggy and Fred, through a densely cluttered, technological-consumer jumble of late 20th century icons.

Rhyme 'Em To Death reconstructs the trial from Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame from a new perspective, that of a minor character - the goat. The trial of the goat, a postscript in the Hugo novel, has been extended and enlivened with actual transcripts of 15th-century trials in which animals were persecuted as witches.

HANDMADE is a film diptych that juxtaposes natural phenomena with technological discovery. Above, we see the chaotic, digitally manipulated streams of a gale-force storm. Below, we see the crafting of a handwoven device made by a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He is making a sensitive instrument for a massive research project studying antimatter, particles that have the opposite charge of ordinary matter. Yet the complex device we see being built has the simplest of means. “The object itself is a beautiful thing made out of parts from a hardware store,” Thornton notes. These vignettes are interspersed with haunting film recordings of fluid dynamics studies, which chart the unpredictable movement of liquid and sand. [Overview courtesy of MoMA]

Video work from collaborative exhibition "once in a hundred years" at Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg and Lumiar Cité, Lisbon, featuring artists Sid Iandovka, Anya Tsyrlina, Leslie Thornton, and Thomas Zummer.

A formal 1861 portrait of a Chinese Mandarin and his wife is the starting point for this allegorical investigation of the fantasies spawned in the West about the East, particularly that which associates femininity with the mysterious Orient. ADYNATA presents a series of oppositions-male and female images, past and present sounds-which in and of themselves construct a minimal and fragmentary narrative, an open text of our imaginations, fears and fantasies.

The title simultaneously references the countdown to the dropping of the bomb and suggests anticipation. Minus 10 juxtaposes footage of the artist’s father in Los Alamos and on the way to Tinian Island with an interview with a woman in Japanese about the bombing. Minus 9 aligns an American nurse’s eyewitness account of the bombing and its aftermath with aerial landscape shots blocked by a blinking blue circle which could represent a mutant sun, an eye, planet Earth, an afterimage, or the inverted “rising sun” of Japanese national symbolism. Minus 8 and Minus 7 show excerpts from a documentary, The Growth of Plants overlaid by running text describing radiation-induced botanical mutations. Minus 6 explores current American war policies and ethics contrasted against the histrionics of Adolf Hitler; as the dictator gesticulates on-screen, women’s voices recite a diatribe by Goebbels.

"Elusive and compelling, Have a Nice Day Alone is surpassingly strange, even for Leslie Thornton, an acknowledged genius of the unexpected. The entire spatial field of the film is activated by a technological nervous twitch, a bizarrely beautiful and hypnotic pulsing. The image shrinks, flows, collapses, seeming to follow some strange and hidden agenda. There is a text about speech on screen, visible through the pulse. In the background, extreme forms of vocalization, yodeling and macabre laughter punctuate the visual space. As the image flutters, a robotic voice speaks about various conditions of speech. Language is dislocated.It is unclear whether the voice mimics or generates the text." (Thomas Zummer)

A short film from Leslie Thornton from 2021.

Thornton evokes the instability that humankind acts upon through a combination of several voices – from cold to melancholic to anxious – all at textural odds with one another. An entry point into the work is the artist’s metaphorical use of the Higgs Boson, first encountered during her recent residency at CERN.

A portrait of Thornton’s sister and a close friend. Shot while studying with cinema verite masters Ed Pincus & Richard Leacock, this early film transgressed documentary norms, shaping its portrait of two women with a formal, almost musical editing schema.

"A fragmented, experimental biography of the 19th-century poet and writer Isabelle Eberhardt, whose brief, unusual life ended abruptly in a flash flood in the desert. The tape makes no claims to telling the “truth” about Isabelle, choosing rumors about her tyrannical, nihilistic father, and her flight to Armenia, where she dressed as a man and “wrote one of the strangest documents a woman has ever given to the world.” Following Eberhardt’s travels and the strangely syncretic vision of her father, Thornton creates a portrait of cultural cross-breeding in which “neither this world nor the other remains.” In all, There Was An Unseen Cloud Moving is an arresting mixture of rare and iconic images that undermines its authenticity through re-enacted “historical” scenes and deliberate anachronisms that place Neil Armstrong in 19th-century Geneva." - Video Data Bank