Contaminated Field of Vision
or: It’s Not Brakhage
2023Contaminated Field of Vision or: It’s Not Brakhage was a solo exhibition presented at 36 Claremont Project Space, Toronto, in October 2023.
Composed of photographic installations, a kinetic sculpture, and a video essay, the exhibition is structured around a 1959 film reel, purported to be a lost work by experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, produced as part of his little-known collaboration with the DuPont chemical company.
The works in the exhibition forensically deconstruct the film's material and narrative provenance, looking beyond the canceled film festival to a twisting network of painters, photographers, musicians, engineers, industrialists, and militarists connected by DuPont's munitions and chemical empire.
See Through I + II
2023Custom-built light tables, digital prints on transparencies, 16mm film, splicing tape
See Through is an extended photographic installation, composed of acetate prints and 16mm film fragments arranged between three custom-built light tables and the gallery’s floor.
The photographs and documents displayed on the tables revolve around a peculiar historical episode, spanning between the 1910s and the 1960s, during which time military-industrial giant DuPont chemical was enthusiastically researching and manufacturing new and experimental kinds of cinematic film stock. The fragments of text and imagery act as forensic documents, attesting to these unlikely threads between military-industrial power and artistic production, connecting them with little-known patronage networks DuPont maintained with many influential painters, musicians, and performers throughout the era.
Cross-sections of work by N. C. and Andrew Wyeth, Howard Pyle, and Frank Schoonover sit alongside DuPont’s documents from the Manhattan Project or ads for military photographic products. Research materials from pioneering musician and inventor Mary Hallock Greenewalt sit beside photographs taken by her son, Crawford Greenewalt, who served as DuPont’s president from 1948-63. Strewn across the gallery’s floor are dozens of miniature transparency prints, featuring high-speed images taken by Crawford Greenewalt’s friend, photographer and military contractor Harold Edgerton.
Quietly scenographic in its design, the installation is intended to conjure associations with both authoritative and unruly forms of inquiry: museological research displays on the one hand, and paranoiac investigations on the other. This ambivalent approach to research-based art channels and illustrates one the work’s central tensions: a desire to reveal the sordid material powers we know are hiding throughout histories of art and film, a recursive suspicion of one's own authority in chronicling these depradations, and an itching uncertainty of what to do with the information revealed.
Machine for Framing
2023Wood, plexiglass, steel angles, LED strips, gear motor, 16mm sprockets, 16mm film
Machine for Framing is a kinetic film sculpture composed of an illuminated steel and plexiglass box, inside of which a closed loop of 16mm film slowly ambulates. Two peepholes cut into the white plexiglass surface allow viewers to peer in, observing only small fragments of the film at a time. The film strip is layered in such a way that faint suggestions of figures, images, or familiar colour schemes occasionally appear, but the constrained viewing angle forbids any synoptic understanding of the time-based object.
The 16mm film strip features a replication of one of the final works by American painter Howard Pyle, commissioned by the DuPont chemical company in 1912. A major catalyst behind the so-called “Golden Age of American Illustration,” Pyle founded a school of painting known as the “Brandywine School” near Wilmington, Delaware, in the late 1890s. DuPont, by far the most powerful company and family in Delaware, also held its centres of corporate and familial power in the Brandywine Valley at the time, and was inextricably involved in the painting school’s development and reach. Influential alumni from the Brandywine School include N.C Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, Frank Schoonover, Violet Oakley, Eleanor Abbott, and many others.
The painting depicted on the film strip, titled DuPont Powder Wagon, was laser-printed on an 8”x10” grid of 16mm film segments, which were then reassembled in a linear strip.
Doubly abstracted, viewed through the inscrutable machine’s narrow aperture, the painting’s forensic index of military-industrial will imprinting on cultural soft-power is transformed into a hypnotic colour field.
It’s Not Brakhage (Prelude)
202300:09:33; HD video with sound
“It’s Not Brakhage (Prelude)” is a hybrid video essay and fiction film. It tells the story of a mysterious film reel, believed to be a lost work by famed experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, made during a ruinous 1959 collaboration with military-chemical giant DuPont.
An unnamed narrator expounds on this mysterious film’s history, identifying it as the only surviving work from a festival of hand-painted films, which DuPont attempted to organize in the late 50s. Cryptically, the narrator muses on the bizarre episode that brought DuPont and Brakhage together as co-organizers, and sifts through a patchwork of theories and speculations that have swirled around underground art circles since the film’s discovery.
Gradually, the narrator begins to hint at a sinister edge underlying the story, suggesting that the film might not just represent an uncanny crossover between experimental film and military-industrial power, but might represent a forensic key connecting this 1959 collaboration with DuPont to Brakhage’s 2003 death from bladder cancer.
Weaving threads of speculative fiction throughout a wide corpus of detailed historical research, “It’s Not Brakhage (Prelude)” attempts to think through the uncomfortable proxies connecting the histories of art and film with deep, menacing systems of power. With a blur of tropes from essayistic documentary, conspiracy fiction, and experimental film, this work questions the legacies of power and violence that hide invisibly within artistic forms, and dramatizes the conflicted desire to understand and break free.
Proof I
2023Digital print on Hahnemühle Ultrasmooth paper
18” x 20”
