Jeremy Moss: Space Material/Immaterial Place
*Filmmaker In Person*
Wednesday, January 7th at 7pm
Kairos West, 742 Haywood Road, West Asheville
$5 suggested donation (no one turned away)
This event is co-sponsored with The Media Arts Project.
Filmmaker Jeremy Moss, whose work has screened around the globe, brings a 60-minute program of recent moving image work to Asheville. In the summer of 2011, Moss began expanding beyond his narrative training to fully explore expressionistic structural tendencies and its application to place and the moving body. As a program, these works cohesively embody an immersive optical and sonic experience reveling in cinema’s capacity for both meditative expression and the rigors of formal experimentation.
ABOUT JEREMY MOSS:
Based in Pennsylvania, Jeremy Moss works in both 16mm and digital video. His films and videos explore and interrogate bodies, identities, and places shaped by rigid boundaries and porous peripheries; his camera design often emulating such strict cultural and physical structures. Moss’ films have exhibited widely at festivals and venues throughout the globe, including Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, Edinburgh International, Chicago Underground, Brooklyn, Crossroads, Cinequest, Athens, Maryland, and Anthology Film Archive in New York. He teaches production, history, and theory at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
THE PROGRAM:
THE BLUE RECORD
16:38 | 16mm digital video | color| sound | 2013
Combining hand-processed 16mm imagery, a deconstructed lyric essay, and an ambient score by composer Vicki Brown, The Blue Record meditates on the pastime of ruin-gazing and its application across a wide range of aesthetic experiences. Informed in part by the work of Alain Resnais, Walter Benjamin, and the Romantic poets, The Blue Record is a collaborative study of what happens when the process of decay is arrested and ruins become commercial entities. Shot on location at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, the film is at once an immersive and Brechtian examination of the experience of destruction as an aesthetic pleasure.
(UN)TETHERED
9:34 | digital video | color | sound | 2014
Measured viewpoints positioned on concentric circles dissect and engage the movement of a solo performer in an abandoned mill. The perspective of both movement and place collide. Suddenly unhinged, the figure unravels and weaves freely, abandoning all formal containments. Featuring original choreography by Pamela Vail and an original score by Jonathan Pfeffer.
THOSE INESCAPABLE SLIVERS OF CELLULOID
6:45 | super8 to digital video | color | sound | 2011
Stumbling upon sun bleached bullet-riddled vintage porn sequestered in hidden desert nooks and sagebrush, circuit boards and shattered glass along off-the-path shooting ranges, rotting cow parts in ritual-like mounds, a prophet’s omniscient and culpable gaze; contemplating ideology and place, attempting to apply memory to moving image.
CHROMA
3:26 | digital video | color | silent | 2012
A wild and hypnotic ride that focuses, via manic perspective shifts, on the driving movement of a solo figure against a backdrop of frenetically flickering colors; these jolting chromatic and frame variations dance as much as the performer.
CICATRIX
6:48 | 16mm to digital video | color | sound | 2014
A textural experience in layers, scars, and deterioration that combines hand processed, tinted, and toned 16mm imagery with an original sonic score by Jonathan Pfeffer. Both sight and sound ooze and emulate those tangible tremors catalyzed by increasing awareness of loss and decay. Initially created at the Independent Imaging Retreat (Film Farm) in July 2012.
THAT DIZZYING CREST
10:37 | 16mm to digital video | color/b&w | sound | 2013
Direct manipulation acts as inciting catalyst as a dancing figure becomes ingrained and lost in the celluloid, creating an immersive new realm for the moving figure. She repeats short phrases of choreography on ambient loop; each repetition alters our perception of movement and space.
THE SIGHT
4:09 | 16mm to digital video | color/b&w | sound | 2012
A song of creation: immaterial space spawns volatile matter; obfuscated landscape emerges from splintering celluloid. Created at the Independent Imaging Retreat, the landscape is seen anew by 16mm hand-manipulation giving rise to a geometry of trees and meadows; the sonic score is subjected to similar direct manipulation.
Mechanical Eye Microcinema 