Thursday, May 11th, 2017
Doors at 7:00... Screening at 7:30
@ The Mini - 1329 Main St.

The Cinema of Things: Following Objects
Curated by Annie Dell’Aria,
PhD, Assistant Professor of Art History,
Miami University

Despite film’s traditional reliance on human performance and dialogue, close-ups of objects have driven narratives and informed cinematic texts since the early days of film. In this selection of recent avant-garde moving image works, artists imagine a cinema that exclusively follows things, shifting focus away from the human experience and towards objects and their networks. Fischli and Weiss turn their studio into a violent and destructive Rube Goldberg machine. Warren Cockerham employs a first-object point of view by covertly placing a camera inside a box of sheets as it makes its way through a Walmart Distribution Center. Allison Cekala’s “biography of a material,” documents the processing and transportation of Boston’s road salt. Lastly, Turner Prize-winning artist Helen Marten’s high-definition digital images mimic the glossy surfaces and textures of real objects, but she juxtaposes them in strange and surprising ways, making poetic and surreal connections not possible in the physical world. Together these cinematic texts explore the causal, economic, and poetic lives of things.

Works in series:

Peter Fischli and David Weiss, The Way Things Go, 1987, 30 mins.

Warren Cockerham, Between the Sheets, 2009, 6 mins.

Allison Cekala, Fundir, 2015, 22 mins.

Helen Marten, Orchids…Or, a Hemispherical Bottom, 2013, 19 mins.

Program will include an introduction by Annie Dell’Aria and post-screening discussion.