lights of unknown origin - films by tooth
The impulse when writing an introductory paragraph like this for a
program of works made over a certain span of time may often be to cast a
unitary net over a disparate collection of moving images as a simple
device to decipher and package. I'd like to resist that impulse as best I
can, despite its potential benefits and failures, to both respect the
heterogenous nature in which each film may or may not have been
constructed, and to suggest that these fusions and cross-pollinations of
meaning might be work that is better left in the hands of the viewer,
to construct as they see fit. I could offer suggestions as to the
various material and surface elements that each work appears to occupy
itself with: political action/struggle, performed ritual, divination
practices, mathematics, linguistics, astronomy, organic decay, the
weather, the impulse (and often failure) to chronicle one's own life -
and surely there are conceptual arcs which may continue throughout the
works: a preoccupation with fragmented and imperfect memory, the
perceptual investigations afforded through trance induction, and so on.
This seeming disjunction of forms is not exactly the point though. It is
not particularly unique or even an especially pronounced aspect to the
program. So, I mention it here and in this form of address to slightly
complicate, however annoyingly, the nature of smoothly offering a
descriptive paragraph to one's own films, but mostly to suggest that if
the work has a unitary concern it might lay in using material elements
to investigate immaterial states over which one must never assume too
much control/authorship and to which some mystery must always remain.
tooth is an artist that works in film, sound, performance and other
time-based disciplines. His work primarily concerns itself with the
phenomenon of trance states and their function within a collision of
cultural, political and personal realities. His film, performance and
installation work has been presented at, The Lab (SF), San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific FIlm Archive, San
Francisco Cinematheque's CROSSROADS Film Festival, Nightingale
Microcinema (Chicago), Mindpirates Gallery (Berlin), NDSM Treehouse
Gallery (Amsterdam), and others. Since 2009 he has been operating
Black
Hole Cinematheque in Oakland, a microcinema and archive which since
2011 has held free weekly screenings focusing on international
experimental/avant garde moving images. Check him our on:
Vimeo
PROGRAM:
palms (2011, 3 minutes, super 8mm)
A california portrait. Obscured
investigation of the myth of “paradise”. Palm trees are a non-native
plant species to california, and their roots span equal parts as far
underground as the trees tower above the earth. Within this, an
overlapping symbology.
year of the rabbit (2011, 3 minutes, super 8mm)
A new year's ritual, in night and rain.
moyah pravda newsreel (2011. 11 mins, dual channel super 8mm)
Fragments of overlapping struggle in oakland, ca
the arc of the sun (2014, 3 mins, 16mm)
An in-camera study of the
Sun Ra Arkestra under the direction of Marshall Allen, bending light and
space with spectral cameos illuminated in the void.
every second has been dreamed of many times before (2014, 3 mins, triple-channel 16mm)
A
projector/sound performance born out of several collaborations with
movement artists; Sophia Wang and Brontez Purnell - and poet; Bernadette
Mayer. made in conversation with Mayer's epic writing experiment,
Studying Hunger Journals.
no translation (2009/2015, 15 mins, super 8mm)
tracing a
constellation of untranslatable occurrence and disparate, persistent
memory through Berlin, New York, Mexico City and the mountains of San
Luis Potosi.
hexagram (2015, 5 mins, dual channel 16mm)
Using 64 xeroxed hexagrams of the I Ching as point of departure for filmic divination.
tetradic moons (2015, 5 mins, dual channel 16mm)
Xeroxed printed stroboscopic study of the lunar form, born of occult numerology and obscured biography.
light of the tulpa (2015, 5 mins, 16mm)
An investigation based on the mystical study of color undertaken in Besant and Leadbeater's 1901 book Thought Forms.
blood signs (2015, 5 mins, 16mm)
"we don't want rosy films — we want them the color of blood."-Jonas Mekas
"Red
is the most joyful and dreadful thing in the physical universe; it is
the fiercest note, it is the highest light, it is the place where the
walls of this world of ours wear the thinnest and something beyond burns
through."-G.K. Chesterton
