Anita Thacher. Loose Corner

About

Microscope is very pleased to present Loose Corner, the third solo exhibition at the gallery of works by Anita Thacher (d. 2017). Loose Corner concentrates on an eponymous 16mm film installation, begun in 1980 and completed in 1986, employing surrealistic sensibilities and optical illusions created with analog film printing techniques to address everyday life and dreams within the domestic realm. A selection of associated photographs from a 1980 series created with optical processes, stage sets and cast of characters similar to those in the film is also on view. The exhibition follows the 16mm film component’s preservation by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences this year.

In “Loose Corner,” as in Kafka and Buñuel, everything looks simple, nothing is. To realize, in shock and high adventure, that we cannot “even” depend on our sense organs and customary ways of perceiving the world around us, confronts us with the imperative need to open ourselves to new visions and to let the opulent magic of a universe more complex than hitherto imagined, enter our unsuspectedly famished bodies. — Amos Vogel, May 1987

For the first time, “Loose Corner,” which debuted in the exhibition “Film as Installation” at the Clocktower in New York in 1980 as a work-in-progress, is shown as an installation as originally conceived with analog rear projection of the 16mm film within the gallery space. (The film in a theatrical version premiered at the opening of the 1986 New York Film Festival and has been screened throughout the years). Described as a “comedy of sabotage” in her original concept notes, the installation involves a life-sized projection of a corner of a room onto a wall-sized screen intersecting an actual room corner to create a trompe l’oeil illusion. “Because of this congruence, the film ‘steals’ the three-dimensional formation for itself and ‘pretends’ to have physical presence,” Thacher writes.

The corner — a typically uninteresting and overlooked area of a room — becomes a site for various real and fantastical activities. Main characters — a woman, man, child and dog — and various objects such as a black and white cube and a red, white & blue ball materialize on screen in their real-life dimensions, but soon begin to shrink and grow, duplicate and engage with one another and other versions of themselves, often changing degrees of opacity and materiality. As the film progresses, the environment shifts as well. The bland corner with unadorned walls takes on the resemblance of a large container with a glass lid, of a beaker filling with bluish-green water, and of a sparkling sea or of a star-filled sky. Like the most skillful magical trick, but performed through the means of cinema, each action leads to the realistic manifestation of the surreal.

“Subjects and objects appear in the corner film in altered and unaltered states, massacring our assumptions and liberating our perceptual beliefs.” — Anita Thacher

The related photographs on view are selections from a series made in early 1980 through optical printing processes that like the film involve the layering of multiple images, eventually resulting in a single picture in which the rules of space, time and gravity are defied.

In the photographs, the characters of boy and dog are played by the same actors as those that appear in the final film, while the role of young woman is played by the artist Francesca Woodman, a friend and neighbor of Thacher’s who lived across the hall at the time. The character of the man does not appear in the photographs, which were completed prior to the initial test shooting of the film later that year.

Loose Corner opens on Thursday December 16th, 6-9pm, 2021 and continues through January 29th, 2022.

Opening Reception: Thursday December 16th, 6-9pm. (Proof of full Covid-19 vaccination and masks are required for the opening). Gallery Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 12-6pm. Address: 525 W. 29th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10001.