Looking back over Wavelength’s eight-year legacy, we revisit a favourite that quickly became a seminal work of the recent avant-garde: Pat O’Neill’s shape-shifting portrait of Los Angeles, Horizontal Boundaries, which first screened in 2003. A different version now exists with a fresh soundtrack in a newly struck 35mm print – ample reason to return to a pivotal film whose issues and techniques are as timely as ever. The title, according to O’Neill, “refers to the divisions between individual frames arranged one above the other on motion-picture film.” Rendered through a variety of printing, editing and compositing techniques, a mythic Los Angeles wavers between ubiquity and elusiveness. A similar ebb-and-flow rhythm emerges in Rebecca Baron and Doug Goodwin’s Lossless #2, part of a series exploring the effects of digital compression upon the film image. Lossless #2 is constructed from a BitTorrent of Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s Meshes of the Afternoon while it is in the process of being downloaded. Its stuttering images form their own ghostly editing patterns and pixilated visual language. By contrast, Refraction Series, by Toronto’s Chris Gehman, experiments with optics. Glorious, ephemeral prisms illuminate the screen, realized through a number of diffracting and refracting light sources filmed on 35mm Kodachrome reversal stock and optically printed onto 35mm.
Public Domain is Jim Jennings’s response to a controversial New York City bill prohibiting filming in public places. This gorgeous city symphony is proof aplenty that the bill was rightly overturned. Robert Todd’s Dig is even more intimately of the street, reconfiguring orange and white Dig Safe marks into a frenetic visual suite that features a staccato jackhammer soundtrack and an unexpected interlude. T. Marie’s Optra Field works are elegant, dichromatic time-based drawings from a series that explores the propinquity between space, time, movement, perception and opposites. Garden/ing by Eriko Sonoda is a playful house-of-mirrors video work that confounds a view from a window with an enlarged photograph of that very vista. Shot frame by frame in a cyclical pattern and eschewing digital editing, Garden/ing – much like O’Neill’s Los Angeles – stymies distinctions between the real and its representation.
Andréa Picard
Pat O'Neill is a Pasadena-based artist and filmmaker whose work has been exhibited at The Whitney Museum of American Art, le Centre Pompidou and the Tate Modern.
Rebecca Baron is an award-winning filmmaker whose credits include The Idea of North (95), okay bye-bye (00), How Little We Know of Our Neighbours (06) and Lossless #2 (08).
Doug Goodwin is an artist, writer and teacher based in Massachusetts.
Chris Gehman is a Toronto-based director and film programmer whose short films include First Dispatch from Atlantis (93) and Contrafacta (00).
Jim Jennings has directed more than twenty films, including Close Quarters (04), Made in Chinatown (05), Silk Ties (06) and Public Domain (08).
Robert Todd is a Boston-area filmmaker whose work includes Evergreen (06), Office Suite (07), Ring (08) and Dig (08).
T. Marie is an interdisciplinary artist whose work has screened at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Portland Art Center and the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art.
Eriko Sonoda is a filmmaker, photographer and installation artist currently living in Tokyo, whose film credits include KAGI (05) and Garden/ing (08).