Luther Price : Quintet

Part of Winter 2014

Quintet– a programme of five works by Boston-based artist filmmaker Luther Price including the premiere of a brand new Super 8 film cultivated from the artist’s The Garden Series. Curated by Scott Miller Berry

“Memory, Possession, Truth, Language, Solitude, Cigarettes, Suicide and Trust.Disorder, Reconstruction, Outtakes and tape. Pinhole, Retrospective, Performance and Velvet …Obsession, Creation, Addiction, Introverted, Reflection, Moving Element … Subject Matter, Day Dreams, Sailors and Anger, Failure, Remorse … Permanent Desire, Documentation, Lip Synch, Animation … Static, Procrastination, Dissolve and Fade. Distortion, Homoerotic Collaboration. Habitat, Transformation, Hieroglyphic, Consideration … Liquid and Fat … One Track Minded Mental Block. Unresolved Reality, Ordinary Restriction. Volatile Combination, Desire, Presentation Meaningless Evidence, Situation Imagination and Dream … Pigment, Punch Holes, Ashes and Swirl … Soundtracks, Pealing, Ribbons Twirl, Maggots and Pink. Comas and Cameras, Liquid Vignette … Juxtaposition, Frame Line, 500 Watts … Cerebral Hemorrhage, Head Vomit, Project … Make Believe Glamour, Glitter and Tonic, A Time Sorted Occasion, A Pleasant Worth While Episode, A Relaxed Flabby Eyelid … A Silver Funeral … and Birthday Cake.” (Scott Miller Berry)

Programme:
Mr Wonderful (1988, Super-8, colour, sound, 10 min.)
Jellyfish Sandwich (1994, Super-8, colour, sound, 17 min.)
run (1994, Super-8, colour, sound, 13 min.)
Sodom (1989, Super-8 to 16mm, colour, 21 min.)
PLUS! A brand new Super-8 film cultivated from the Garden Series

Luther Price received a BFA in Sculpture and Media/Performing Arts from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where he studied with Saul Levine. He is an experimental filmmaker whose work has been widely screened in and exhibited at such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, SF Cinematheque and in a retrospective at the 2013 Oberhausen Film Festival. His early films often incorporate controversial subject matter, usually featuring the artist performing in a variety of personas, while the more recent film works have tended to test the physical threshold of celluloid, marring, painting and even burying reels as a means to corrode the surface materiality of film. Price is a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and is represented by Callicoon Fine Arts, NYC.

“I want to make true films. I don’t care if it hurts me… people exploit each other anyway. If you exploit yourself you leave no room to be exploited by someone else… No one can hurt me; no one can say anything about me because I’ve already said it. I’ve already given them the dirt. We always have the ability to redeem ourselves… ” Luther Price

“Price’s film work has an oppressive intensity, envisioning an alienated world of often mindlessly repeated rituals and poses that entrap and suffocate his subjects. He sets up a constant dialogue between his compromised victim-subjects (often himself or his own family) and the equally compromised film stock itself. Images of ruptured flesh and ghostly birthday parties are further ruptured and drained of life by Price’s torturous manipulations of the film, which can include chemical processing, filters, optical printing, re-photography, and even holes punched in the frame. What emerges is Price’s great subject — the breaches, breakdowns, and collapse of body, family, and society, and by extension all of life, in the face of unstoppable philosophical forces. What makes it work is the nonstop flow of extraordinary, unforgettable imagery.” Gary Morris, from “Home Movies From Hell,” Bright Lights Film Journal