I have been invited to create a project for this show:

FAX which originated at The Drawing Center in NYC in 2009 and includes John Armleder, Liam Gillick, Matthew Higgs, Clair Fontaine, Josephine Meckseper and many more.

San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery
May 4 – July 21, opening Friday May 4 6-8pm

Attn: Miss Calpurnia
Saturday May 26, 2-6pm

Attn: Miss Calpurnia is an iteration of a film, a figure, a still, an image, a page and a color fax machine. In a never-ending, transforming loop, material components move from film to video to fax to copy to print in the deconstruction of the still and moving image.

Colvin’s structuralist film Miss Calpurnia (2011) acts as a starting point; stripped bare a re-filmed, re-configured fragment from Kelly Reichardt’s Meeks Cutoffallows the simple act of chasing after a scarf in the wind to build into a visual score. The editing process–change of speed, direction, repetition, jump cuts, residual sound and color shifts–becomes film-time and film-image.

Perched on its pedestal the fax machine ‘copies’ a series of faxed color stills from Miss Calpurnia. A fleeting figure frozen on the page is caught up in its own elusive choreography as the sheets of paper fall to the floor. These stills mark a performance of sorts which in turn compile into an issue of Vladimar and Rosa, Colvin’s latest ephemeral publication devoted to the moving image. This loose-leaf assemblage is given away during Attn: Miss Calpurnia with the edition number determined by the ink reserve. Vladimar and Rosa is itself open to a re-staging of the visual information in the hands of the viewer.

A final iteration of Attn: Miss Calpurnia will take the form of a blown-up version of one of the faxed stills which will be displayed in the gallery for the duration of the show as a 30×40 inch plotter print (courtesy of David Cunningham).

The kind of cinema I care about is at the level of poetry – in fact – it has been in a way my life’s work making film poems – Margaret Tait.

I am very honored to have been nominated for the Margaret Tait Award. Set up by the Glasgow Film Festival “this award will recognise artists who are experimental, innovative and who work within film and moving image”.

Margaret Tait was a very inspirational figure, a fiercely independent Scottish poet and experimental filmmaker.

“Born in 1918 in Kirkwall on Orkney, Scotland, Tait qualified in medicine at Edinburgh University 1941. From 1950 to 1952 she studied film at the Centro Sperimentale di Photographia in Rome.

Returning to Scotland she established Ancona Films in Edinburgh’s Rose Street. In the 1960’s Tait moved back to Orkney where over the following decades she made a series of films inspired by the Orcadian landscape and culture. All but three of her thirty two films were self financed. She wrote poetry and stories and produced several books including three books of poetry.

Her first feature film Blue Black Permanent (1993) opened the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Her final film Garden Pieces was completed in 1998. Margaret Tait died in Kirkwall in 1999″.

A unique and underrated filmmaker, nobody like her. Born of the Italian neo-realists, formed of her own Scottish pragmatism, optimism, generosity and experimental spirit, and a clear forerunner of the English experimental directors of the late 20th century. A clear example of, and pioneer of, the poetic tradition, the experimental tradition, the democratic tradition, in the best of risk-taking Scottish cinema – Ali Smith, writer.

Visiting Glasgow-based artist and curator Alex Hetherington:

Anne Colvin’s video, performance and spoken word  lecture was dazzling. Edits: clean, precise, perfect. A sonic/visual sentence, a scholarly screen.

Here is my  interview with feminist icon Carolee Schneemann for Lux.  Carolee was is in in town for a screening at Eli Ridgway Gallery on the occasion of Millenium Film Journal #54.

The past weeks have seen the unexpected force of Hurricane Irene wreak havoc along its path, leaving us meteorologically bewildered and with a newfound existential barometer.

Someone who was no stranger to tempestuous weather was George Kuchar, low-fi filmmaker extraordinaire, who passed away on 6 September after a battle with cancer. I recently spoke with him on the phone while he was in hospital receiving treatment. Despite his weakness, he rose to the occasion and we talked about his video series ‘Weather Diaries’ (1977–2011)……

Here’s an interview between myself and Getty Curator, Glenn Phillips for LUX in the UK. We talked about the history of video art in California and the forthcoming Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A.1945-1980.