Walker Moving Image Commissions
Walker Art Center
1750 Hennepin Ave
Minneapolis, MN 55403
The Walker Art Center is excited to announce the Film/Video department’s name shift to Moving Image beginning in June 2015. The renaming commences with the launch of two major initiatives: the Walker Moving Image Commissions, a new series of artist commissions made to premiere online; and the Walker Mediatheque, a new interactive space to watch projected works from the Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection.
Walker Moving Image has commissioned six artists to each create a new work to premiere online launching with Moyra Davey and James Richards in June 2015. Premiering online for a limited run, invitations to make new works were based on an awareness to the inquiry, inspiration, and influence of three signature artists within the Walker’s Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection: Derek Jarman, Bruce Conner, and Marcel Broodthaers.
The first commissions by artists Moyra Davey, a Canadian artist based in New York, and James Richards, a Welsh artist based in Berlin, are works made with an invitation to think through the legacy of Derek Jarman. Both commissions will stream from the Moving Image Commissions page, from June 1 for a limited run, and are accompanied by essays from Isla Leaver-Yap, Bentson Film Scholar at the Walker.
Future commissions will acknowledge the signature presence of Bruce Conner within the Walker’s collections, presenting new works by New York-based artists Leslie Thornton and Seth Price. Price and Thornton both work with an awareness of Bruce Conner’s complex inquiry into appropriated material and the aesthetics of new technologies. To be launched later this year, both commissions will also premiere online for a limited run.
A third pair of upcoming commissions will feature new works from Los Angeles-based Shahryar Nashat and New York-based artist Uri Aran, who will respond to the films of Marcel Broodthaers within the Walker Ruben/Bentson collection. Both Aran and Nashat work closely with found objects and modes of translation in their respective practice. These commissions will premiere in 2016.
Walker premiere Commissions
Notes on Blue by Moyra Davey
Moyra Davey’s new film, Notes on Blue—responds to artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman’s Blue. A lyrical essay film, Notes on Blue interweaves various biographies (including those of Jarman, poet Anne Sexton, the writer Jorge Luis Borges, and the artist herself) to explore the subjective experience of mortality, color, and identity. (2015, video, 28 minutes)
Davey is a writer and visual artist known for the convergence of photography and video. Her work attends to familiar objects culled from domestic and everyday environments. She frequently resituates overlooked aspects of daily life and everyday consumption within her own intimate narratives and deep personal histories.
Radio at Night by James Richards
James Richards’ new work responds to Derek Jarman’s visual collage and editing techniques, as well as Richards’ continued interest in sampling, distorting and looping gestures. Radio at Night explores ways in which broadcast technology seeks to preserve obscurity and anonymize individuals by abstracting images of the human body and estranging its gestures. Echoing Jarman’s own interest in collapsing together memory, moment, and fantasy, Richards’ video stretches and refracts his source material, which comprises news broadcasts; popular songs and poems of fraternity, love, and innocence written prior to the era of HIV/AIDS; and found footage from the artist’s personal archive. (2015, video, 8 minutes)
Richards, known for his provocative and emotionally resonant work, was the winner of the 2012 Derek Jarman Prize for Film and Video. He was recently nominated for the 2014 Turner Prize for the video Rosebud (2013). His work often draws on a range of sources such as home movies, TV shows, esoteric Internet videos, and archival footage.
Project Coordinator: Isla Leaver-Yap
Funding
Major support to present the Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection and the Walker Moving Image Commissions is generously provided by the Bentson Foundation.
