Cooper Handmade Cinema Group
Hands-On Film & Projection WorkshopsOpening Event: “FOUR EXPANDED CINEMA PERFORMANCES”
To start the workshop series, The Cooper Union Handmade Cinema Group presented a night of multi-projector 16mm film works by Jennifer Reeves and Simon Liu:
Friday, January 31st 2025 @ 7pm
Rose Auditorium @ Cooper Union, 41 Cooper Square, NY, NY 10003
Free Admission, open to the public
About the Films:
Jennifer Reeves - "LIGHT WORK MOOD DISORDER"
Film artist Jennifer Reeves and musician Anthony Burr collaborated to create this live film and music performance, which mixes and subverts symbols of science, industry, medicine and illness. Multiple film screens and live music immerse the audience in intense color, rhythmic molecular forms and textures, and morphing frequencies. 20th century educational films are literally sewn together with melted down pharmaceuticals affixed directly to the film. The projector acts as a microscope enlarging crystallized antibiotics, heart, and mood medications, forming a concentrated fusion with pulsating sine waves and multi-tonal bass clarinet. Illustrations of brain dendrites, synapses, waveforms and assembly lines personify the movement of frequencies and light that envelop the audience. This associative meditation on invention and manufacture, mind and body, and industrialized medicine, creates a bold impression of the first century of celluloid.
Jennifer Reeves - "HE WALKED AWAY"
He Walked Away superimposes landscape, portraiture, abstraction, and hand painted film. Much of the film reframes shots and outtakes from Reeves' earlier work (Configuration 20, Fear of Blushing, The Time We Killed). The double- projection film is often shown with live performers.
"Much in the way musicians will mine their previous compositions to create newly evolved works, He Walked Away is a distinct yet nostalgic film. It distills what my eyes and camera have witnessed, captured, and lost in 15 years of artistic growth. These are my discoveries, obsessions, vanishings and growing pains."
Simon Liu - " HIGHVIEW"
Upon the North Point a torrential downpour of instants tease their way into sight, but never fully form. Shutter-induced memories reduced to speckles, dissipating into fog. Here, my initial disappointments in a material defect morph into opportunity - satisfying an itch to melt instances together, to see any number of places as one. I want to go home. These images were meant to show us what goes where - but I can't make out the path. Maybe we should lay them all out on the floor and try to put the pieces back together. In another five days, I'll need to leave. —SL
Simon Liu - " HARBOUR CITY REDUX"
A view through cracks between fish markets and high-rise buildings; urban imagery of Hong Kong and the indulgence of domestic life. Incited by the airy weight of digital platforms and their approaches, I imagined ironing flat potentially conflicting 16mm negatives via an industrial contact printer. Views thicken; detail lost over generations. A dream of turning two images into one, a density of information reserved for the modern cloud. —SL
About the artists:
Jennifer Reeves has made 25+ film-works since 1990; from avant-garde shorts to expanded cinema performances and experimental features. Reeves’ work has shown extensively from the Berlin, Toronto, and Hong Kong Film Festivals to the Museum of Modern Art, universities, and microcinemas worldwide. Reeves’ acclaimed visceral and personal works immerse viewers in intricate, unfamiliar cinematic territory. Her work elucidates themes of mental health, feminism and sexuality and the natural world. Since 2003 Reeves has collaborated with celebrated composers/ performers, including Marc Ribot, Skúli Sverrisson, Elliott Sharp, Zeena Parkins, Anthony Burr and Eyvind Kang. Her multiple-projection films with live music have been performed internationally, from the Sydney Opera House and the Berlinale to RedCat in Los Angeles and the Wexner Center in Ohio.
Simon Liu (b. Hong Kong, 1987) is an artist filmmaker whose practice centers on the rapidly evolving psychological and sociopolitical landscapes of his homeland of Hong Kong through material abstraction, speculative history, and subversion of documentary cinema practices via short films, multi-channel video installations, mixed media prints, and 16mm projection performances. His work has been exhibited at institutions including the Whitney Biennial 2024, Museum of Modern Art, MOCA Los Angeles, The Shed, PICA, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Museum of the Moving Image, Everson Museum, Moderna Museet, "Dreamlands: Expanded", and the M+ Museum. His films have screened at festivals globally including the Toronto, New York, Berlin, Rotterdam, BFI London, Edinburgh, Jeonju, and Hong Kong International Film Festivals alongside the Sundance Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, CPH:DOX, Cinéma du Réel, Punto de Vista, Viennale, and the Media City Film Festival. The M+ Museum and MoMA recently acquired Liu’s Quadruple 16mm Projection Highview, along with other recent works, for their Permanent Collections. He is currently editing his first feature film, Staffordshire Hoard.