Forrest Sprague

Ryzyup (pronounced rih-zee-up) presents a series of unstable, shifting images that resist clear recognition. Shapes appear briefly before dissolving back into motion and texture. The film invites a mode of attention where perception softens and the viewer begins to drift inward.

Created for Close-Up Cinema's 20th Anniversary

The story of quantum Alice and quantum Bob. Words, and music. A film within the film. What is in the mind of an autistic baby? An animal baby. What is in the mind of Bob and Alice? The pathos of Bob and Alice. Looking for my ghost.

The duration of the shot determines the meter. And, often enough, a movement within the shot determines the shot’s length. The edges of frames are indicators, and they have a Diebenkornian importance. His Ocean Park series, like the construction pit, make incidentals (a worker's gestures, notes of an overpainted color) the indicators that consummate the field.

The images take on a pictorial flattening of their space to almost a collage or even decollage-esque effect. One that constructs upon itself with beams and wires but also one that excavates into itself by spraying away ground or simply digging. The workers are very much pieces of this space. So they may be read as material, as cost, like the sheet metal. As tools in a work and world. The material reality of what is filmed, labour, and the relevance of that to any history of collage in using found materials or repeated stacking and sticking and tearing of sheets of publications or signifiers to work.

A study of a landscape shot in one night during the Nor’easter of December 2020. Untouched by footprints or other evidence of human activity, the action is instead produced by a flurry of falling snow, and the light play of car headlights as they drive past the John Finley Walk.

"The play of abstraction and at the same time realism gives rise to many thoughts beyond the sheer visual pleasure." -Larry Gottheim

An ode to NYPL -F.S.