WEBVTT

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[Josiah McElheny: Making a Projection Painting]

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Today we're at my friend's studio

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and we're projecting lost footage--
or abandoned footage--

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by the great filmmaker, Maya Deren.

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Long after Deren died, they found the
leftover tails of shots

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and unused shots that she did complete

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that were then preserved as
just kind of a reel

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with no kind of edit to them.

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And what I thought to do was to create
a sort of performance

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in which we would project the film,

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and then I invited a film crew to come and
film the film

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as it's being projected on the screen.

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And the idea was to film from the worst seats.

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So imagine you're in a theater

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where you're stuck five feet in front of
the screen,

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so that when you're looking up,

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you see all this, kind of, distorted vision.

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One comes from an unfinished and lost film
called "Witch's Cradle"

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in which she collaborated with Anne Matta Clark
and Marcel Duchamp

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and was filmed at the famous
Art of the Twentieth Century gallery.

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I'm trying to understand this relationship
of abstraction and the body.

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She navigates this area between abstraction
and the body.

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The body becomes almost abstract
in some of her works.

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In the end, the film will be shown not as
a film,

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but as a painting on a kind of structure

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in which the front of the painting
is a piece of glass

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and behind it is a kind of fractured landscape,

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which will then further distort
on the painting itself.

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When we showed narrative film on these
distorting sculptures,

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it didn't work at all.

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It just looked like we were
commenting on it,

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or that you really felt us looking at this
preexisting work.

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Whereas using the unfinished film,

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it transformed itself much easier.

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It became something new almost instantly.

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That was really interesting to realize

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actually how enviable, in some sense,

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an original work of art can be--

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how complete it can be,

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and you can't, somehow, distort it.

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That the unfinished is what felt more malleable.