Meditations on Loss: Leslie Thornton at ROCKELMANN &, Berlin May 29 – July 16
ROCKELMANN &, Berlin and Winkleman Gallery, New York, have announced REAPPEAR, a solo exhibition by Leslie Thornton. Widely recognized as an innovative and highly influential filmmaker, Leslie Thornton is perhaps best known for her epic, 25-year serial work Peggy and Fred in Hell, which follows its title characters who, in Thornton’s words, are “raised by television“ and live in a „post-apocalyptic splendor…adrift in the detritus of prior cultures.“ Unknown to her during her own childhood, both Thornton’s father and grandfather worked as scientists on the Manhattan Project (which developed first Atomic bomb). She attributes having learned this as an adult to why the atomic bomb and themes of apocalypse appear in some of her works. Indeed, themes running through much of Thornton’s work include language, childhood, nuclear war, technology, ethnography, seriality and narrative structure.
The main work presented in this exhibition is a three-channel installation titled Luna (2013). On each screen there is an image of the parachute-jump tower at Coney Island. Each image is captured and modified so that the reference to place and object is transformed, and subsumed, only to reappear as another form of spectacle. There are occasional figures, walking by, and there are a great many seagulls punctuating the shifting surfaces of the image. Thornton’s project deals with the relationship between chronology, technology, mediation, and with the “historical” as an artifact of the cinematic/digital image. Luna is an invocation of loss, as well as a tacit critique of nostalgia. How do you address history with something as fragmentary and minute as cinema? What occurs and is at stake in today’s digital absorption of the “world”? By focusing on the presence of the technical image, Luna addresses the trace: an impression, a trace of a voice, a trace of the disappearance of voices, an unflinching engagement with the passing away of place. In Luna, the trace is almost subsumed, it saturates the auditory field, and in this diffusion, it (almost) disappears, leaving but a ghost, an audial echo, riding the repetitive circulation of increasing static/noise: memory’s future.
Also shown in this exhibition, three works from Leslie Thornton’s latest series, titled SNAPs (SNAPS: Tar II (2016); SNAPS: Torso (2016); and SNAPS: Drill/Pump (2014). SNAP: Oil/Air/Water made its World Premiere at Thornton’s solo screening of her work at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 2013. This new series of short, intense video loops extends Thornton's ongoing consideration of photography into a framework of passing time.
Leslie Thornton’s works have been exhibited worldwide, with screenings at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Harvard University, and installations/exhibitions at Museum53, Shanghai, China; Zürcher Gallery, New York/Paris; Tate Modern, UK, FluxSpace, Philadelphia, IFFR/Museum of Natural History, Rotterdam, and solo shows at Winkleman Gallery, NYC, and Elizabeth de Brabant Gallery, Shanghai, China. Thornton has won many awards: she is one of the youngest artists to have received the Maya Deren Award for Lifetime Achievement from the American Film Institute/Anthology Film Archives; she has also received awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, The Alpert Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts; In 2013 she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Leslie Thornton is currently Professor in the Modern Culture and Media Department at Brown University, and Faculty in Media at the European Graduate School/ Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinare Studien (EGS/EUFIS).
Join the artist for the opening of ‘REAPPEAR’ on Saturday, MAY 28, from 7 to 10 pm. For more information and or press images please contact Geo at:geo@rockelmann-and.com.
LESLIE THORNTON REAPPEAR
OPENING: May 28, 2016, 7 – 10pm DURATION: May 29 – July 16, 2016
ROCKELMANN &
Schönleinstraße 5
10967 Berlin
E: info@rockelmann-and.com
T: +49 (0) 30 – 863 841 34
OPENING HOURS
Thursday – Saturday: 1 – 6 pm
