This is not film-making. Artists work for cinema – Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery, 6 December 2016

This is not film-making. Artists work for cinema
Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery, Auckland Tuesday 6 December 2016, 7pm.
This is not film-making. Artists work for cinema features five new works by New Zealand artists Gavin Hipkins, Juliet Carpenter and Gregory Kan, Daniel Malone, Louise Menzies and Nathan Gray (AU). Commissioned by CIRCUIT and curated by George Clark (UK), each artist was invited to make a single channel work up to ten minutes in length in response to the writings of the late New Zealand conceptual artist Julian Dashper (1960-2009).

Screening will be followed by discussion withJuliet Carpenter, Gavin Hipkins, Louise Menzies and George Clark

Gavin Hipkins, New World (2016) Digital Video, Sound, 12:38 minutes
Louise Menzies, Go into the density of it (2016) Digital Video, Sound, 6:30 minutes
Juliet Carpenter and Gregory Kan, mean time 2016 (2016), Digital Video, Sound, 5:38 min
Nathan Gray, Untitled (ß) August 2016 (2016), Digital Video, Sound, 11:56 min
Daniel Malone, Victory Over The Sun, Or, Spaghetti Western Unlike You & Me (2016) Digital Video, Sound, 11 mins, 21 secs

 

House Studies II publication

House Studies II
published by Jonathan Smart Gallery, New Zealand
Launch event: Wednesday, November 16, Split/Fountain, Auckland
& Saturday, November 19, Smash Palace, Christchurch

‘House Studies II’ is a publication with contributions by Aodhan Madden, Ash Kilmartin, Daegan Wells, Emma Fitts with Raewyn Martyn, Georgina Watson, Sophie Bannan, Joshua Harris, Kim Pieters, Kirstin Carlin, and Louise Menzies with George Clark.

This is the second iteration of an ongoing project that reimagines specific histories of practice – relative to their natural and built landscapes, social and political environments – forming fictional and actual communities of practice. This publication has been curated and compiled by Sophie Bannan, and printed with the generous support of Jonathan Smart Gallery.

Together with Louise Menzies we contributed the text Moving Towards The Sun, an illustrated conversation around our practices.

Softcover, 190 x 290mm, 68 pages + poster

Cover image: One of the first three photographs taken from the Anglo-Australian telescope at Siding Springs, South-Eastern Australia, in 1974 by Ben Gascoigne. Courtesy of National Archives of Australia.

House Studies II 'Moving Towards the Sun' Louise Menzies & George Clark
House Studies II ‘Moving Towards the Sun’ Louise Menzies & George Clark

2016 – ‘On Correct Colour: Notes on Margaret Honda’s Films'(in: Made In L.A, 2016)

On Correct Colour: Notes on Margaret Honda’s Films’
By George Clark, p94-102
In: Made In L.A 2016: a, the, through, only
Ed. Aram Moshayedi & Hamza Walker, Hammer Museum / UCLA, USA, June 2016

Sea of Clouds, 60th BFI London Film Festival

60th BFI London Film Festival
Friday 14 October 2016 15:45, BFI Southbank, NFT3
Premiere of Sea of Clouds /  雲海 (2016) in programme The Past Is Present Too with works by Stina Wirfelt, Louis Henderson, and Filipa Cesar curated by Benjamin Cook.

“Shot in Taiwan and structured around an interview with the artist Chen Chieh-jen, Sea of Clouds focuses on the public film screenings that took place during Japan’s colonial rule over Taiwan, which were covertly used to hold political gatherings.”  – BFI London Film Festival

Films in Place of Places at 25 FPS, Sept 2016

Films in Place of Places
25 FPS International Experimental Film & Video Festival, Zagreb, Croatia
Friday 30 September, 16.00 KINO SC

This is the first presentation of ongoing project Untitled (Eyemo Rolls). For the screening newly printed 35mm film rolls were screened in dialogue with work by Chick Strand, Peter Hutton, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Mok Chiu-yu & Li Ching, and Joanna Margaret Paul and Tito & Tita.

Eyemo Rolls #1-3 (George Clark, 35mm, 3 min)
0116643225059
(Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand, 1994, 16mm transferred to digital, 5 min)
Eyemo Rolls #23, #26-27 (George Clark, 35mm, 4 min)
Thorndon (Joanna Margaret Paul, New Zealand, 1975, 8mm transferred to digital, 5 min)
Eyemo Rolls #50, #54, (George Clark, 35mm, 4 min)
Letter to the Young Intellectuals of Hong Kong / 給香港的文藝青年 (Mok Chiu-yu & Li Ching, Hong Kong, 1978, 35mm transferred to digital, 20 min)
Eyemo Rolls #56, #74-76 (George Clark, 35mm, 3 min)
Guacamole (Chick Strand, USA / Mexico, 1976 , 16mm, 10 min)
Eyemo Rolls #56, #33-34 (George Clark, 35mm, 3 min)
Director’s Cat (Tito & Tita, Philippines, 2013, 16mm transferred to digital, 2 min)
Eyemo Rolls #78, #80-83 (George Clark, 35mm, 4 min)
Images of Asian Music (A Diary from Life 1973-74) (Peter Hutton, USA, 1974, 16mm, 29 min)

Phantom Topologies

Phantom Topologies
CIRCUIT Artist Film and Video Aotearoa New Zealand, Wellington
7-10 September 2016

Symposium, screenings and exhibitions bringing together works from New Zealand, the Philippines, the UK, Hong Kong and Canada and including five new film commissions This is not film-making. Artists work for cinema by Gavin Hipkins, Juliet Carpenter, Daniel Malone, Louise Menzies and Nathan Gray curated by George Clark.

Blind Matter: On The Economy of Images

Blind Matter: On The Economy of Images
MUMA / Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia
7 August – 14 September 2016

Blind Matter draws together a diverse range of works in which filmmakers and artists have sought to explore the economies of images. From reflections on the potential of plastics – the trade of fossils, creation of images of desire – to new worlds mined within virtual spaces, these works complement Nicholas Mangan: Limits to Growth, and the way in which the exhibition reflects on the relationship of art and abstraction to processes of value creation. Taking its title from Victor Hugo’s statement ‘Man makes blind matter serve him’, the program seeks to reflect our relationship to matter in an age of globalisation and the increasingly mediated nature of our interactions with matter. Featuring works by Harun Farocki, Beatrice Gibson, Lucy Raven and Alain Resnais.

The programme was curated to accompany Nicholas Mangan’s exhibition Limits to Growth while I was participating in the Monash Art, Design & Architecture artist in residence program 2016.

Programme

The Power of the Market: The Pencil (Milton Friedman, USA, 1980, 2.30min)
‘Look at this lead pencil. There’s not a single person in the world who could make this pencil.’ – Milton Friedman
In his famous polemical parable of the pencil, the economist Milton Friedman, describes with awe the wonders and supposed inevitability of the free market as a means to both liberate people and eventually bring about world peace. This short speech, extracted from the 10 hour PBS documentary series Free to Choose, seen in the light of the recent financial crisis, displays the utopia thinking behind neo-liberalism. In regarding the simple pencil, Friedman describes the global labour and industry behind it, demonstrating that interconnected markets cooperated across language, religion and belief, enabled by the ‘magic’ of the market to create this simple product.

La chant de la styrène / The Song of Styrene (Alain Resnais, France, 1959, 19 min)
This early essay film by Alain Resnais is a celebration of the potential of plastics. Shot in striking colour, the film is a paean to the abstract qualities and malleability of this new material. Providing a fascinating insight into the optimism behind plastics prior to realisation of the stark environmental damage their production causes, the film also anticipates the potential of the material only now being realised with the advent of 3D printing. Le chant du Styrène / The Song of Styrene was commissioned by French industrial group Pechiney to highlight the merits of plastics with a commentary by Raymond Queneau composed in Alexandrines, the film examines with futurist zeal the abstract potentials of an emergent age of plastic.

Ein Bild / An Image
Harun Farocki, Germany, 1983, 25 min
Four days spent in a studio working on a centrefold photo for Playboy magazine provided the subject matter for my film. The magazine itself deals with culture, cars, a certain lifestyle. Maybe all those trappings are only there to cover up the naked woman. Maybe it’s like with a paper-doll. The naked woman in the middle is a sun around which a system revolves: of culture, of business, of living! (It’s impossible to either look or film into the sun.) One can well imagine that the people creating such a picture, the gravity of which is supposed to hold all that, perform their task with as much care, seriousness, a responsibility as if they were splitting uranium. This film, An Image, is part of a series I’ve been working on since 1979. The television station that commissioned it assumes in these cases that I’m making a film that is critical of its subject matter, and the owner or manager of the thing that’s being filmed assumes that my film is an advertisement for them. I try to do neither. Nor do I want to do something in between, but beyond both.’ – Harun Farocki, 1988

The Deccan Trap (Lucy Raven, USA, 2015, sound by Paul Corley, 4:19 min)
‘The Deccan Trap is a sci-fi fable that goes back in space and time, from some of the newest 3D images being produced in India—at post-production studios in converting outsourced Hollywood films from 2D to 3D—to some of the oldest—bas-relief carvings in Ellora’s rock cut temples in Madhya Pradesh.’ – Lucy Raven

F for Fibonacci (Beatrice Gibson, UK, 2014, 16 min)
F for Fibonacci develops a particular episode from JR, in which a televised music lesson is scrambled with a maths class on derivatives inside the mind of its child protagonist. Musings on aleatory music become muddled with virtual stock pickings and a theory of ‘market noise’. Unfolding through the modular machine aesthetics of the video game Minecraft, text book geometries, graphic scores, images from physics experiments, and cartoon dreams, blend with images from wall street: stock market crashes, trading pits, algorithms and transparent glass. – Beatrice Gibson

Artists & Thinkers: Nicholas Mangan and George Clark

Artists & Thinkers: Nicholas Mangan and George Clark
MUMA / Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia
2 August 2016

Nicholas Mangan and George Clark discuss Limits to Growth, the current survey exhibition of Mangan’s work at MUMA and specifically Mangan’s filmic works in relation  to the ‘essay film’ as a mode of film practice. The talk took place while I was participating in the Monash Art, Design & Architecture artist in residence program 2016.

Image: Nicholas Mangan Limits to Growth, 2016 installation view (Bitcoin rig in the basement of Monash University Museum of Art).