No. 10

Paintings collide to produce panels of time distended with space, set to music by Tashi Wada. While the score is spare, the image is excessive, the meter working with and against the imagery. The picture is made from paint-soaked 16mm film strips, reinterpreted with a digital camera, edited to cycle in short, hallucinatory loops, forming abstract thaumatropes.

Hand-painted frames that oscillate between red and blue. Alongside the frames emptied of figuration, the relentless tones of Revenant form a wall of sound, an intense viewing and listening experience.

A simple score: when the loop is one frame long, it plays only once; when it is two frames long, it plays twice; three frames, three times; and so on. Space compresses but time stretches under this operation and instead of going nowhere, the repetition suggests infinity. As Dziga Vertov once said, there is time inside of time. Merle Haggard was in the audience when Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins played this song, Folsom Prison Blues, at San Quentin. Carl Perkins' locomotive guitar solo gets caught up in the gears of this video and stretches like a penny on a rail under the weight of a passing train.

A 16mm film that is a musical score: two small spots of sunlight slowly move over five hand-drawn lines, creating a subtly shifting piece of music for live musicians to perform. -MB

A hand-made, paint soaked film, allowing evaporation, dust, crystallization, mold, and more to inform the image. Film strips— stained over days, weeks, and months with acrylic paint, ink, urine, termite droppings, etc.—are soaked in paint and saturated with time, resulting in a turbulent palimpsest with many layers and textures visible at once, each one moving with its own rhythm. There is an affective quality to the excesses of the imagery that is both repetitive and ecstatic, yet the overall experience is quiet and reflective.