Tar Pits Film

Jennifer West won a 35mm film print of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Red Desert (1964) on Russian Ebay and dragged it along the Pink Beach off the coast of Sardinia, Italy, where some scenes of the film were shot. Fragments of coral and crushed shell create pink-hued sand that mark the surface of Antonioni’s first color film. Grains of sand and rocks coalesce upon and scratch the surface of the film, which was then transferred to HD frame by frame.

Film Title Poem is comprised of over 500 film title cards.

70MM Film Leader soaked in MSG and boiling water - inscribed & stamped with the word seriously - with Viagra, Visine and Fake tanning lotion, 2008, 1 minute, 1 second 70mm film transferred to digital video

70mm film kissed with lipstick & impressed with teeth marks.

Geological elements and erosion leave marks on a strip of 70mm film that floated in the Dead Sea and soaked in clay before getting stuffed in a suitcase to be brought back to Los Angeles, where it was submerged and sat in buckets filled with mud and salt for years in the artist’s studio. After five years, Jennifer West dragged the film along the mud and salt crystal encrusted spiral of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty before throwing it in the icy pink waters of Utah’s Great Salt Lake—the film’s frames were then digitally photographed and re-stitched together. Through material traces of mud, salt crystals and sand, distant places and layered temporalities flicker across a film that lasts less than one minute.

16mm b&w and color film neg danced on with sneakers, sprayed with cherry tomatoes, rubbed with cinnamon butter buns, strawberries and candy bars – based on lyrics from Sleater Kinney, Bikini Kill and Le Tigre – food fight on the table performances by Ariel West & Jwest, shot on superbowl Sunday by Peter West who was kind of drunk.

16mm black & white film soaked in lithium mineral hot springs, pennyroyal tea, doused in mud, sopped in bleach, cherry antacid and laxatives - jumping by Finn West & Jwest.

16mm film negative sanded with surfboard shaping tools, sex wax melted on, squirted, dripped, splashed, sprayed and rubbed with donuts, zinc oxide, cuervo, sunscreen, hydrogen peroxide, tecate, sand, tar, scraped with a shark’s tooth, edits made by the surf and a seal while film floated in waves.

65mm film negative RAY-O-GRAM made by laying 100 foot long necklace atop the film negative, exposing it with colored flashlights - made in front of live audience in Rome, Italy - featuring 100 foot long leather necklace strung with pasta and mussel shells collected in Rome, and sea shells, eucalyptus pods and a few feathers from California - flashlights performed by students from Rome: Nicloletta Guglielmucci, Ludovica Palmieri, Alessia Notarangelo, Lorenza Bessone, Elisabetta Masala, Givlia Fontani, Damaride D'Andrea, Claudia Cavaliera, Antonio Pizzolante, Saverio Verini, Cristina Meregaglia and Mariah Csepanyi and Jwest, 2011, 32 seconds 65mm film transferred to hi definition video

Commissioned by MIT's List Visual Art Center, funded in part by the Nimoy Foundation as part of residency Curated by Joao Ribas

16mm color negative, positive and b&w negative scratched with tumbleweed, tire treads, pine needles, sprinkled with BlackJax extreme energizers pills, coffee, donuts, hot cheetohs & doused with gasoline & gatorade

Skinnydipping Carbon Beach Malibu Film – In Front of David Geffen's House (16MM color and b&w film neg sprayed with fried pickle juice, painted with Bloody Marys using, celery stalks & ash from the Malibu fires, submerged in the ocean – skinnydipping by Renee Lotenero, Lia Trinka-Browner, Karen Liebowitz & Jwest – lit by the full moon & search lights)

16mm film print painted with birth control pills, writing inks and sweat - bought from a Brooklyn, New York street vendor.

16mm color and b&w film neg rolled with hard boiled eggs, oranges, lemons, avocados, pickles, green apples, milk and watermelon – a remake of a scene from Vera Chytilova’s 1966 film, Daisies – rolling off the bed performances by: Mariah Csepanyi, Finn West & Jwest, lit with black light & strobe light.

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.

70MM Film Leader Covered in Strawberry Jam, Grape Jelly and Orange Marmalade - licked and sledgehammered by Jim Shaw, Marnie Weber, Mariah Csepanyi, Bill Parks, Alex Johns, Karen Liebowitz, Roxana Eslamieh, Chaney Trotter & Jwest- a filmic restaging of moments from Allan Kaprow's 'Household', 2008, 3 minutes, 17 seconds 70mm film transferred to digital video