SFCINEMATHEQUE

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Thursday, April 3, 2003

Fresh Eyes: New Artists at Cinematheque

Program 11: Delicate Meditations, Films by Karen Johannesen and Sheri Wills

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts





Providence-based Sheri Wills and San Francisco-based Karen Johannesen work intimately with self-processing, photogramming and other direct techniques to create impressionistic films of subtle color and fleeting, soft gesture. Wills’ films-including Fever, Acetylene, specimens 28 to 42, Anodyne, Effigy: specimens 4 to 12, Elegeia, Nocturne Nos. 1&2, Palliation, Riderless and H’un (Lacerations)-are lush, flower-like works made with a Victorian attention to intimate detail and obsessive ornamentation, accompanied by hauntingly minimal and evocative soundtracks. Similarly delicate, Johannesen’s films focus particular attention on texture and small detail, resulting in works which subtly merge their photographic subjects with their filmic surfaces into fields of deep, quiet mystery and beauty. Johannesen will screen 76 Station, Algonquin Winter (both small-gauge landscape studies), RMF #2 and a recently completed series of abstract photogrammed films. (Steve Polta)