The Films of Phil Solomon @ the Charles Theatre

Magic Eye & Johns Hopkins University present:
The Films of Phil Solomon
Thursday, April 8th at 9pm - $9.50
The Charles Theatre


Magic Eye and Johns Hopkins University are pleased to host an evening of film and conversation with acclaimed experimental filmmaker Phil Solomon. Visiting the east coast for the opening of his multimedia installation “American Falls” at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Phil Solomon will make his Baltimore debut at the Charles Theater. The screening will include excerpts from “American Falls” and a selection of his films and videos, including his 1989 film “Remains To Be Seen” which Stan Brakhage named as one of his Top Ten Films of All Time for Sight and Sound magazine.

Solomon’s film work employs an array of chemical and optical treatments to explore the natural state of decay of 16mm film. The results produce a molten emulsion unique to his cinema, a visually mesmerizing struggle between a captured image and the materiality of the medium.

"Although part of a long avant-garde tradition, Mr. Solomon makes films that look like no others I've seen. The conceit of the filmmaker as auteur has rarely been more appropriate or defensible — The liberating effect of Mr. Solomon's work suggests a rather different realm: Film Meets Vision, Rejoice!" – Manolha Dargis, New York Times

His recent video series called “In Memoriam, Mark Lapore” operates in the genre of machinima. Appropriating scenes from the lawless world of Grand Theft Auto, Solomon quells the crime wave and creates a trance-like wandering through a desolate urban landscape. The trilogy, named as one of the Top Experimental Films of 2007 by the Village Voice, will close the evening’s program.

Phil Solomon teaches at University of Colorado – Boulder. He has participated in two Whitney Biennials and has had three Cineprobes (one-man shows) at the Museum of Modern Art. He has won a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1993) and The Thatcher Hoffman Smith Award (2007), as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Creative Capital Foundation.

Magic Eye presents Baltimore filmmakers @ the Charles Theatre

Monday, February 22, 2010
9:30pm
The Charles Theater
$5

Magic Eye is proud to present a night of short films and videos created by Baltimore artists. This group features work by Kari Altmann, Kristen Anchor, Mark Brown, Lauren Friedman, Jenny Graf, Clarissa Gregory, Justin Kelly, Andrew Mausert-Mooney, Catherine Pancake, Jimmy Joe Roche, Paul Sharitis, Stan Vanderbeek, Fred Worden and Karen Yasinsky.


The films, dating from the early 60s to contemporary work, range from experimental narrative to animation, music videos and performance documentation.


In celebration and remembrance, Magic Eye will screen Paul Sharits’ T,O,U,C,H,I,N.G (1968) featuring the Baltimore poet David Franks.

This installment of Magic Eye is programmed by Matt Porterfield.

Magic Eye presents "Passerine" @ Load of Fun

MAGIC EYE presents “Passerine”
Sunday, December 6th – 8pm - $6
The Lof/t at Load of Fun (120 W. North Ave)

Magic Eye is pleased to present Raha Raissnia and Kenny Wollesen on their Baltimore debut. They will premiere a sound / performance collaboration titled "Passerine".

Raissnia is Brooklyn-based expanded cinema artist. Influenced by the work of Harry Smith, Bruce Conner, Jim Davis and Paul Sharits, she incorporates painting, live projection and installation in her performances. Combining collaged and hand-painted 35mm slides with 16mm film projections, Raissnia’s projections produce a “slow-moving montage during which scenes are at once temporary and aleatory. The arrangement underscores cinema’s inherent paradoxical structure of manipulating stillness to conjure up the illusion of movement.” (R.R.)

Recent exhibitions include Miguel Abreu Gallery (NY), Kill Your Timid Notions Festival (Dundee, Scotland) and Xippas Gallery (Paris).

“My work in general aspires to music. Time dimension, like in music, structures the unfolding of my still images, whether they be paintings, drawings, or hand painted collaged slides and films. I am interested in producing synaesthesia effects. In my film performances I use my prepared projectors like musical instruments and incorporate improvisational techniques.” – R.R.

Drummer Kenny Wollesen is an artist of astonishing versatility, skill, and ingenuity. He has been one of the most active musicians in N.Y.C.'s downtown jazz and avant-garde scene. In the recent years he has been leading his own highly innovative and artistic bands: Himalayas and Wollesonic Laboratories for which he collaborates on making a variety of homemade instruments that are surreal, filled with subtlety and ingenuity. These bands tend to perform in unusual settings and events and evolve and morph with time. The members of these bands include such artists as Dalius Naujo, Jonas Mekas, Jonathan Haffner, Jeniffer Harris, and many more.

Kenny has long been collaborating with John Zorn and is a member of his band Masada. He has been touring and recording extensively with Bill Frisell and the band Sex Mob.

Magic Eye presents: Survey the Landscape tonight @ Load of Fun

Survey of the Landscape is the first of a series of screenings focused on the landscape film The conversation begins with Larry Gottheim's meditative "Fog Line" and continues with Deborah Stratman's "From Hettie To Nancy," a fascinating work that blends documentary and experimental film.

Sunday, October 18 at 8pm.
$5
Lof/t


Larry Gottheim's "Fog Line" (1970)
“One stares, one stares, and the fog begins to lift, the exquisite image reveals itself. The three patchy trees, the landscape lines, the tension lines, the moving ghost animals, the moving emulsion swirls, all impress themselves on consciousness, are consciousness. Still, rigid lines attempt to contain the amorphous elusive moving fog. Line nature competes with fog nature, but all is harmony, bathed in gorgeous paleness.” - Larry Gottheim
From the late-1960s series "single-shot" films to the dense sound/image constructs of the mid-1970s and after, his cinema is the cinema of presence, of observation, and of deep conscious engagement. While addressing genres of landscape, diary and assemblage filmmaking, Gottheim's work properly stands alone in its intensive investigations of the direct, sensual experience in collision with complex structure of repetition, anticipation and memory. (REDCAT)



Deborah Stratman's "From Hetty to Nancy" (1997)
"The stoic beauty of the Icelandic landscape forms a backdrop for a series of witty and caustic letters written at the turn of the century by a woman named Hetty as she treks with her companion Masie, four school girls and their school marm. The film juxtaposes Hetty's ironic cataloguing of the petty social interactions as they endure discomfort and boredom with historic accounts of catastrophes that reveal the Icelandic people subject to the awesome forces of nature." - Deborah Stratman
Deborah Stratman is a Chicago-based artist and filmmaker interested in landscapes and systems. Her films, rather than telling stories, pose a series of problems - and through their at times ambiguous nature, allow for a complicated reading of the questions being asked. Many of her films point to the relationship between physical enviroments and the very human struggles for power, ownership, mastery and control that are played out on the land. (pythagorasfilm.com)