An Outdoor Screening of films by California artist, Jennifer Bolande.
The Composition of Decomposition, (2018) is a film montage composed of fragments of The New York Times cut from the center of a stack of newspapers, forming by chance the diptychs that are the basis of the film.
“Recalling both photomontage and newsfeed (in the strictest sense), the work’s subtle yet profound impact derives from repeated chance encounters between texts and image that prove, at turns, jarring, beguiling, and banal.” –Sophie Cavaloucos, The Museum of Modern Art
The period of the film, 2012-2015, preceding the election cycle of 2016, is a trip through the recent past freed from directed, remembered, or expected narratives. With the newspaper dematerializing and new technologies transforming how we experience the events of the world, The Composition of Decomposition draws attention to the processes of perceiving, reading and interpreting information. The film immerses the viewer in a slow but steady river of diptychs providing a space to observe the trajectories of images and the ways that meaning shifts and transforms in the passage from one context to another, from page to screen, from news to history.
The Composition of Decomposition will be preceded by a recently completed short landscape film titled Visible Distance, 2019 (2 minutes)
Program will start at 9pm and again at 10pm
Composition of Decomposition, 2018, (48 minutes)
Visible Distance, 2019 (2min.18sec.)
Currently based in California, Bolande came of age in the late seventies as part of New York’s Pictures generation. Exhibiting in New York at Nature Morte Gallery, Metro Pictures, Artists Space, and The Kitchen, Bolande was noted early on for her works exploring the materiality of photographs. She uses various strategies and media including photography, film, sculpture, and installation to explore affinities and relationships and to convey embodied experience. For more than 30 years, Bolande has built a lexicon of recurring elements, which she recombines to generate new meanings as they pass from one context or material to another. Her work examines what is changing, vestigial, or disappearing, and calls into question distinctions between event and object, real and imagined, and received and potential meanings. Resisting a fast read, the work draws attention to the invisible forces—such as narratives, cultural codes, preconceptions, and projections—that condition human consciousness.
In 2010, a thirty-year retrospective of Bolande’s work was presented by INOVA in Milwaukee, WI, which also travelled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA and the Luckman Gallery at California State University, Los Angeles, CA. Her site-specific project, Visible Distance/Second Sight, was featured in the inaugural Desert X 2017 in Coachella Valley, CA. Solo exhibitions of her work have appeared at institutions and galleries around the world such as Kunstraum, Munich, DE; MoMA PS1, and Magenta Plains Gallery, New York, NY; Kunsthalle Palazzo, Liestal, CH; Margo Leavin, Los Angeles, CA; Galerie Sophia Ungers, Cologne, DE; Urbi & Orbi, Paris, FR; and Nordanstad-Skarstedt, Stockholm, SE, among others. Her work was recently included in museum exhibitions such as Celebration of Our Enemies, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Readymades Belong to Everyone, Swiss Institute, New York, NY; Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; Mixed Use Manhattan, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, ES; Skyscraper, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; This Will Have Been: Art Love and Politics in the 1980s, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL. Bolande has been awarded fellowships from John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Tesuque Foundation, Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, and Andy Warhol Foundation. She is professor of New Genres in the Department of Art at UCLA.