presented in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
[members: $7 / non-members: $10]
Order advance tickets here.

SFMOMA’s Field Conditions exhibit (on view September 1–January 6), presents graphic works which, in the words of the exhibit’s curator Joseph Becker “redefine the relationships between figure and ground, […] place and non-place, finite and infinite.” Similarly, the film/video works in this program imagine the cinematic frame as a locus of diffuse and vibrant energy, as a ground from which figures may (or may not) emerge. Len Lye‘s Free Radicals and Particles in Space use the simplest of graphic film techniques to enter the third-dimension. Jodie Mack‘s Unsubscribe #1: Special Offer Inside, flickering and flocking, goes postal on the picture plane while her Untitled (for R.) finds foreground and background playfully (and profoundly) confounded. Nathaniel Dorsky’s 1983 film Pneuma—a glorious arrangement of color film stocks, unexposed and imageless—celebrates the cinematic understructure, the material and spiritual essence of the cinematic ground. Finally, Andrew Noren’s Imaginary Light, described as “intuitive conjuring and orchestration of retinal phantoms, refined by abstraction into music for light and mind,” an exhilarating and vertiginous plunge into the dematerialized dramas of light and shadow revealed in everyday views. Also screening: 20Hz by Semiconductor, a sculptural visualization of a high atmosphere geo-magnetic storm; and Mamori by Karl Lemieux, a kinetic study of the Amazon rain forest, created in collaboration with composer Francisco López. (Steve Polta)