Flux Screening: Out of Control
Bodies lurch, stumble, shake and tremble in many of the shorts and music videos screening in the upcoming Flux Screening Series this Thursday, September 15, 2011 at the Hammer Museum.
In The Exhibitionist, we're treated to one man's dizzying tour of MOCA's Art in the Streets show captured in a fast-paced stop-motion animation by directors (and brothers) Kent and Mark Osborne. In Going to the Store, David Lewandowski, an LA-based animation artist known for his work on the title sequence for Tron: Legacy, launches an oddly boneless and fleshy body into a quiet neighborhood, while My Best Friend's Wedding by Daniel Kwan and Daniel
Scheinert (the LA-based band DANIELS) features a hapless would-be groom who sweats himself into nothingness. And in Control, photographer Pieter
Hugo and cinematographer Michael Cleary illustrate South African DJ Spoek Mathambo's cover of "She's Lost Control" by Joy Division in a decidedly disturbing and visually arresting video that enigmatically touches on religion, street gangs and violence, and plays overtly with notions of black and white, making the stunning black-and-white cinematography literal.
However, the show also includes moments of grace, with bodies moving more gently, as in the almost ethereal images in Aviary, a video for the band Mint Julep
created by the Berlin-based artists Vivien Weyrauch and Fabian Röttger, who go by the name A Nice Idea Every Day. The video features a trio of teens romping through an afternoon on the edges of Berlin as the sun fades. The pale images seem slightly unreal as they stutter back and forth, still pictures that somehow manage to separate the figures from the ground. Describing the technique they used, the pair says, "The basic idea behind our 'camera shift' technique is to shoot a scene with two cameras from a slightly different angle but with the same focal point - basically like traditional 3D, but then to alternate between the two cameras in the edit to create a kind of 3D image without the need of fiddly 3D glasses." The result? Lovely.
The line-up includes many more shorts and music videos, including new work by Aaron Rose and Suzi Yoonesi. One of the best parts of the Flux Screenings is the discussion afterward, and this edition will feature many of the LA-based artists describing how and why they did what they did. The Flux Screening Series takes place at the Hammer Museum. The bar and doors open at 7:00 p.m.; the screening starts at 8:00 p.m.; an after party follows with DJ Heidi in the Hammer courtyard.
