Description:

Luther Price: NEW UTOPIA and LIGHT FRACTURE
WITH VISUAL STUDIES WORKSHOP CURATOR TARA MERENDA NELSON IN PERSON!

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The handmade 35mm slides “feel like film, but they also feel like paintings, and they also feel like sculpture. They fill a space in a different way. The slides have allowed me to rethink things, set myself into a new pattern of working, in a whole other format that is still projection, is still light.” –Luther Price

Experimental filmmaker Luther Price (1962-2020) was one of the most original voices in American avant-garde cinema. Beginning in the mid-1980s with Super 8mm films and continuing in 16mm from the 1990s to his untimely passing in 2020, Price produced a large body of work that was raw, visceral, dark, and beautiful. Moving away from his own filmed material early on, Price embraced found footage filmmaking – transforming the often banal found images through aggressive editing and later by distressing the found film material with household cleaning products, by burying film in his backyard allowing it to rot, and by hand-painting the footage. Carried over from his early sculptural work, Price brought a hands-on, tactile approach to filmmaking, which he further extended beginning in the 2000s to collage-like handmade 35mm slides. In his films and slides, Price dealt directly and indirectly with issues around family, injury, queerness, trauma, and death. His work ranged from provocative and disturbing to tender and beautiful – reflecting Price’s own complicated personal histories unapologetically.

This program features the projection of two series of 35mm slides – New Utopia and Light Fracture, both from 2017, that Price donated to the Visual Studies Workshop. VSW curator Tara Merenda Nelson will introduce and provide context for these astonishing mini-collages. Accompanying the slide works are two early Super 8mm films by Price: the performance-based film Clown (1990-2002) and the found footage collage film Jellyfish Sandwich (1994).

Program includes:

NEW UTOPIA (Luther Price, 2017, projection of eighty handmade 35mm slides)

LIGHT FRACTURE (Luther Price, 2017, projection of eighty handmade 35mm slides)

CLOWN (Luther Price, 1990-2002, 13 min, Super 8mm film)

JELLYFISH SANDWICH (Luther Price, 1994, 17 min, Super 8mm film)