Luminous Triptych: Angelina Krahn, Karen Johannesen, Rick Bahto
Monday, October 12, 2009
Artists’ Television Access, San Francisco
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Echo Park Film Center, Los Angeles
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Deus Ex Machina / No Festival Required, Phoenix
Karen Johannesen – Light Quanta (2004) Super 8, color, silent, 5 minutes.
“In Heisenberg’s view an atom is certainly real, but its attributes dwell in an existential limbo halfway between an idea and a fact, a quivering state of attenuated existence that Heisenberg called ‘potentia,’ a world devoid of single-valued actuality but teeming with billions of unrealized possibilities.” Nick Herbert, Ars Electronica
Karen Johannesen - Light Speed (2007) Super 8, color / b&w, silent, 6 minutes.
This film is a study of my immediate surroundings, my living space, capturing the images I see on a daily basis. It is built like a collage or a mosaic, frame by frame, to amass into a larger perception of a space. Using single frame techniques, images overlap and reside simultaneously in the same space/time. Repetition of images and form create a visual vibratory frequency. KJ
Angelina Krahn – Hide in California (2006) 16mm, b&w, silent, 5 minutes.
A paranoid portrait of San Francisco’s Tenderloin and North Beach Broadway strip, Hide in California invokes film noir history and supplants its fleshly denizens with nocturnal neon apparitions.
Angelina Krahn – Stigmata Sampler (2006) 16mm, b&w, silent, 4 minutes.
On the surface, Stigmata Sampler is an exploration of the filmmaker’s body landscape as seen through another’s lens. Reclaimed by the film’s nude subject with the aid of a sewing machine, the film’s additive process becomes subtractive as tarantula-like fibers creep through each frame, obscuring the naked form while the needle penetrates and ultimately destroys the film plane.
Angelina Krahn – Piñata (2000) Super 8, color, silent, 7 minutes.
An aerial self-portrait, this dynamic first film relies on gravity, tensility, and a cable release to tread the tenuous and circuitous path between examination and exploitation.
Rick Bahto – Variations (2004) Super 8, b&w, silent, 5 ½ minutes.
An animated portrait.
Rick Bahto – The Bellouin Sequence (2008) un-slit regular 8 mm, color, silent, 3 minutes.
A portrait in several short movements. The movements each explore different ways of creating rhythm and movement from a stationary subject, exploiting the possibilities of working with un-slit regular 8 film. The work was shot single-framed and edited in-camera.
Angelina Krahn – Schism (2002) 16mm, b&w, silent, 4 minutes.
Primitive photographic processes create a portrait of illness and instability.
Rick Bahto – Study No. 1 ‘Buenos Aires’ (2009) Super 8, color, silent, 3 minutes.
Rick Bahto – Study No. 3 ‘Phoenix’ (2009) Super 8, color, silent, 6 ½ minutes.
These two films are selected from a larger cycle of studies, each one filmed in a different city and focusing on a single element of camera work (in the case of these two films zooms and tracking shots respectively). The films are meant to both teach myself something about the element of camerawork selected, and to explore my relationship to the city in which it was filmed.
Karen Johannesen – Reflective Material Film (2002) Super 8, color, silent, 10 minutes.
Multiple layers of abstracted space coalesce to create a phenomenon of kinetic color and light. KJ
Karen Johannesen – Daylight & The Sun (2009) Super 8, b&w, silent, 5 minutes.
“..light itself comes in packages..and is emitted and absorbed not continuously, but in small units of quanta..traveling through space at high velocity.” The Dancing Wu Li Masters
Rick Bahto – Improvisation with pool (2008) Super 8, color, silent, 3 minutes.
A short improvisation in my mother’s garden on a rainy winter day in Phoenix.
Filmmakers
Obsessed with the expressionistic possibilities of direct filmmaking, Angelina Krahn prefers to hand-process each camera roll, further manipulating the images through scratching, sewing, and chemical alteration. Her work exploits the physical and textural properties of the film plane, often pushing the original material to the brink of destruction. Through optical printing, she creates frenetic rhythms that evoke fragmentation and paranoia. Her films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Cinematheque, among other venues.
Karen Johannesen uses her background as a painter, and her research into quantum mechanics to enlighten her practice of filmmaking. Karen embraces the intimate home movie qualities of a small gauge format to address ideas that are inspired by the theories of physics and how we perceive our environment. Karen’s films have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Cinemathequethe, the IIju Art House in Seoul, and many more.
Rick Bahto received a BFA in filmmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004. His works have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Seoul Festival of Experimental Super 8 Film, the Director’s Lounge (Berlin), Wolfart (Rotterdam) and Experimental Film Now (Preston, UK), as well as around the Bay Area at the San Francisco Cinematheque, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Artists’ Television Access, the New Nothing Cinema, Stanford University, New Langton Arts, and the Balazo Gallery. His other great passions are gardening and miniature schnauzers.
Luminous Triptych: Angelina Krahn, Karen Johannesen, Rick Bahto