Inwards Outwards Onwards

I think of my films as narrative collages, wherein the edges of found and original materials bleed and blur, as their affect and meaning accrue somewhere outside the sum of their parts. Humor and sorrow become interchangeable currencies, as public and personal memory mutate into one. The sound of one story shifts into the space of another, and the line between past and present is dissolved in echoes. The emotional mechanics of popular media are unraveled and amplified, pointing to our tenuous grasp on reality, the manufacturing of sentiment, and the strangeness of our present moment. This program includes four of my films made over the past two decades: And We All Shine On (2006), These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us (2010), Onward Lossless Follows (2017), and Polycephaly in D (2021).

The four other artists’ films included here are works I deeply admire, both for how they commune with the cosmic, and for their observational clarity. In contrast to my heavily layered films, these works all employ deceptively simple structures to work their entrancing magic. Lightning (1976) by Marlene and Paul Kos is a single-take exercise in belief and elemental conjuring, while the marriage of sound and image is subtlety shifted across a firework-filled sky in Tomonari Nishikawa’s Light, Noise, Smoke, and Light, Noise, Smoke (2023). Shimmering luminescence on water opens a haunting portal of remembrance in Chick Strand’s Kristallnacht (1979), and a collection of glowing, alien botanicals twirl in oblivion in Thalé (2009) by Barry Doupé. All four of these films offer open, reflective, mesmeric experiences, and I am thrilled to see them screen alongside my own.

Michael Robinson