Louise Curham + Lucas Ihlein + Nicci Haynes
About the work
Autumn Fog (Lynn Loo, UK 2010): 2 x 16mm film, projectors, instructions, projectionist-performer, colour, silent.
Horror Film 1 (Malcolm Le Grice, UK 1971): 3 x 16mm projectors, zoom lens, instructions, projectionist, performer, colour, silent.
Introducing the event
16mm is dead, long live 16mm. Join Teaching and Learning Cinema’s Louise Curham and Lucas Ihlein for an hour of live performance that uses 16mm.
Experience Lynn Loo’s Autumn Fog, a 15 minute double projection performance for two 16mm film projectors. Loo filmed her garden in autumn and then intentionally fogged parts of the film with light and heat. This introduced unexpected and dramatic errors into what is otherwise a calm and meditative experience. The projectionist/performer adds to this literally multi-layered experience by intervening in the image, adding and removing some colours, adjusting and shifting focus, building drama from the garden, the fog and the 16mm machines themselves.
Then experience Malcolm Le Grice’s Horror Film 1, a 9 minute projection performance for three film projectors. Shifting blocks of colour form a frame on the wall reminiscent of Josef Albers. A figure begins a walk from the screen, using the body to make bold geometric shadows on the coloured frame. Walking backwards to the projectors, the figure’s shadow grows larger as the light from the three projectors and their colours wraps around the figure, producing a complex interplay from these very simple and obvious ingredients.
Artist statement
The artists who made these works live far from Canberra and usually, performing them needs the artists to be present in person.
To get around this problem, Teaching and Learning Cinema have been working for some years on making instructions for works like Lynn and Malcolm’s. Testing and finalisation of instructions for Autumn Fog took place with a group of Australian artists at PhotoAccess (CBR) in 2019. This year, TLC produced instructions for Horror Film 1, this will be their inaugural performance.
First made in 1971, Horror Film 1 is celebrated all around the world as a stand out work of expanded cinema, a type of art that emerged in the late 1960s and early 70s.
Definitions abound for expanded cinema. Most relevant for these two works that come from the London Film Makers’ Co-op scene of the ’70s (Le Grice) and its descendents (Loo), is that expanded cinema looks like a combo of experimental film, conceptual and performance art.
Images
Louise Curham + Lucas Ihlein
About the artist
Teaching and Learning Cinema is an artist group run by Lucas Ihlein and Louise Curham. TLC evolved from the Sydney Moving Image Coalition, which was a filmmakers and film lovers group with a specific focus on Super 8.
TLC explores moving image as lively and alive. Back in the early 2000s, our manifesto was ‘breaking down the passivity of looking at images’. We gravitate towards expanded cinema, art that emerged in the late 1960s and early ’70s that combined media and live performance. Some public highlights are our expanded cinema re-enactments at the MCA, in the Unconscious Archives series in London (2013) in the exhibitions Imprint (Artspace, Sydney 2009), the Hollow in the Paper (Hobart 2013), Thirteen Rooms (Kaldor Projects Sydney 2013) and our national tour of Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone back in 2005, reprised at Cementa (Kandos, 2013).
Nicci Haynes
About the artist
Nicci Haynes is a visual artist for whom experimental film has become a significant component of an art practice that encompasses performance, printmaking, drawing, and mad-scientist constructions. The sequential nature of film images allows her to integrate different elements of her varied practice, such as drawings print, objects and collage.
Nicci lives on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country and is a tutor at Hands On Studio.
- Living 16mm - two performances
- 2022
- Performance