Holly Willis

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Unstill Lives

Holly Willis
Film noir on acid best describes Jeremy Blake’s Sodium Fox, a dense, dazzling moving-image portrait jumbling the moody angst of urban predawn wanderings with the sunny exuberance of beach-side afternoons. Our troubled hero, Silver Jews band member David Berman, speaks in cryptic voice-over fragments, and his object of desire, dressed......
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Animations

Holly Willis
A skinny, naked girl struggles wildly to escape the stuffy living room where she’s kept by a man in a red suit in Nathalie Djurberg’s haunting claymation short There ain’t no pill. Djurberg’s plasticine figures resemble a child’s tattered old puppets, but she adds strange and poignant details — a......
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Writing in Public

Holly Willis
Afew months ago, McKenzie Wark began to do something in public that’s normally done in private. He began to write a book. Online. Unlike the bloggers among us, Wark didn’t hop on TypePad or Wordpress and start cranking out daily entries. Nor did he set up an online working space......
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El Doctor

Holly Willis
Suzan Pitt thrilled audiences in the early ’80s with her 20-minute animated film Asparagus, in which the pungent vegetable becomes a strange yet tasty sexual organ. Raucous, surreal and visually ecstatic, the film heralded a new generation of animators known for their provocative subject matter and surreal imaginations. Pitt has......
Bliss and Heaven

Jesper Just

Holly Willis
Many of the most intriguing moving-image artworks of the last decade fascinate by exposing the tools, techniques and pleasures of traditional film, at once dismantling and reconfiguring the form to suit a culture interested in seeing how things work. In his trio of short video works screening at the Hammer......
Photo by Sharon Lockhart; Blum Gladstone Gallery

Pine Flat

Holly Willis
The last line of Sharon Lockhart’s new film, Pine Flat, is “Oh, my god,” and it’s hard not to sense the infinite in the film’s oscillation between rigor and turmoil, between the eternity suggested by landscapes and the fleeting moments of lived experience. The film is composed of 12 unmoving......

5 Transmissions From the Post-TV Frontier

Holly Willis
Television has been getting a much-needed makeover this year, thanks in part to the advent of new portable video-playing devices. The networks are scrambling to jump on the bandwagon by offering to sell episodes of various existing shows, and new companies like Lime are forming to create “next generation” media......
Photo by Allan Sekula

The Lottery of the Sea

Holly Willis
Voluptuous folds of inky oil slop from a truck like cake batter in the opening shot of Allan Sekula’s ambitious new film, The Lottery of the Sea, a dense rumination on globalization and seafaring. Sekula, a photographer and theorist who teaches at CalArts, then asks a difficult question in voice-over:......
My Love Is an Anchor

Reckless Behavior

Holly Willis
It’s almost an adage that if you give artists video cameras, they will inevitably either jerk off or hurt themselves. The Getty’s “Reckless Behavior” show, curated by Glenn Phillips, focuses on the latter, with projects showing artists doing very bad things to their bodies. In My Love Is an Anchor,......
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Digitalforum: Video Masters: Classics From the '70s

Holly Willis
With stray street noise muffling soundtracks and ambient light dimming images, DigitalForum’s outdoor presentation of classic video art by California-based artists isn’t ideal, but so what? Few video art screenings are. With a large screen suspended over the Crate & Barrel store and plenty of outdoor seating, the One Colorado......