SFCINEMATHEQUE

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Friday, November 19, 2010

RADICAL L@TE: Performance Anxiety

A co-presentation with Pacific Film Archive

Pacific Film Archive





In BAM/PFA galleries

(Doors 5 p.m., D.J. 6:30 p.m.)

Programmed by Steve Seid and Kathy Geritz

Life is a stage, but life with images is a performance. Nao Bustamente has a rep for off-kilter performances that have an edge of spoofy menace. Bustamente’s most recent large-scale undertaking, Silver & Gold, has her cross-dressing as legendary filmmaker Jack Smith and his molten muse Maria Montez. Projected video serves as a passageway between realms of enchantment. Conceptualist Jonathan Keats feels that plants should travel just like the rest of us. To provide that thrill, he’s made Strange Skies, a moody montage of Italian skies for the stay-at-home shrub. Sound improviser Theresa Wong will perform the score live, with flourishes just for the gathered foliage. In 1975, Daryl Sapien (with Michael Hinton) erected a thirty-five-foot wood pole in Gallery B, ascended the hefty post, and then drove in wedges as he descended. Splitting the Axis had video cameras and monitors positioned around the gallery’s ramps to provide a dislocated view. Sapien will place monitors along those same ramps, recreating Splitting the Axis, now dislocated by decades.