Screening Room

About

In a separate exhibition in the second gallery room, Morgan Fisher’s film Screening Room will be screened hourly. Bronze sculptures by Michel François hang on alternate walls between Liz Larner’s wallmounted ceramics. In forming these sculptures, both artists relinquish control of their primary materials. For François, this means forgoing a mold, letting the bronze drip and flow to retain the dynamic viscosity of the metal’s molten state. Similarly, Larner’s process exploits the sensitivity of the clay and the unpredictability of firing and glazing to alchemical effect. The exhibition includes two different forms from her slab-rolled ceramic series: the convex passage and the textured calefaction, embedded with stones and minerals. Tony Lewis fabricates his site-specific floor drawing in the gallery’s front antechamber by rubbing and suffusing sheets of painted paper with graphite powder. The floor drawing is transposed into the main gallery room as a sculptural installation, at once a footprint of the adjacent space and a commemoration of the artist’s graduate school studio that was often engulfed in graphite dust. Lewis uses the same minimal materials to create his large-scale schematic drawings of brick walls. Virginia Overton responds to the different sites in which she salvages her materials and builds her work, creating installations and sculptures that bare the traces of their spatial and functional history. Many of the recycled objects and materials she repurposes come directly from exhibition sites or her family’s farm in Tennessee. Screening Room (1968/2016) by Morgan Fisher is a hand-held tracking shot that travels along 10th Avenue and then enters the gallery, culminating in the temporary screening room where the viewer sits watching the film. This is the fifteenth state, to use Fisher’s word, of the film. Despite appearances, they are all the same film because they all have the same relation to their screening rooms. The film is not remade, but rather made again. The film can only be seen projected as a film in a screening room, refusing the universal availability of the moving image that has become the norm. The film will screen once an hour from 10 am to 6 pm, Tuesday through Saturday. Another film by Morgan Fisher will be in the exhibition Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema And Art, 1905–2016, opening October 28 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.