Richard Kerr

With his project for the FOFA Gallery vitrines, experimental filmmaker and Concordia faculty member Richard Kerr will present several of his signature works from the series motion picture weavings as well as a new body of projections coupled with paint-based objects. This material iteration of the “spinning camera” technique Kerr created to present hypnotic and deeply formal concerns evoke Marcel Duchamp’s rotary reliefs and early machinist modernists like Jean Tinguely and his metamechanics.

The works intriguingly also combine the disparate intentions of the two artists: Duchamp’s art for the mind and Tinguely’s joint proposition within Nouveau réalisme of new ways of perceiving the real, as the spinning images and the paint objects are seemingly the same visions stilled. When presented in combination of the motion picture weavings, the body of work comes into focus as one of constructed realities that the artist is complicit within.

The exhibition and conversation will afford the opportunity to unpack Kerr’s particular path of constant production, described by Pittsburgh-based filmmaker, curator and writer Brett Kashmere as a mix of aesthetic intensity/energy and patient observation/restraint that results in a fusion of abstraction and documentary styles.

"My Statement is a verb; look, make, learn, teach, a daily practice. I am motivated by the processes of intuition, spontaneity and stream of consciousness. I am curious and ask questions about materials, technology forms, and aesthetics. To answer the questions and satisfy the curiosity I always return to the daily practice of look, make, learn, teach ..."

Richard Kerr is a visual artist-media maker known for his expansive body of work, which has explored a multiplicity of genres and mediums since the 1970’s. He has created over 30 films and videos that have been screened and collected internationally. In the 1990’s Richard expanded his practice to encompass meta-cinema installation work and most notably the conceptualization of the Motion Picture Weaving Project. Richard is a teacher/artist, as such his studio informs his teaching and his teaching inspires his studio work.

As a life long practitioner an educator of Avant-Garde cinema. I have been asked to reflect on the future of cinema. As an educator, I am working with a generation of students whose central concerns and question are “What is cinema?” of the more heated debate, “what is not cinema, or what is cinema’s future?”. In fact, what they are asking is “How am I going to navigate and find my place in the future?” The questions of cinema’s future I would suggest, are more tedious than complex.

To survive as practitioner in the today/tomorrow world of digital cinema one needs clarity of purpose; confusion leads to loss of time and a softening of ideas and resolve. I am blessed and therefore I do not panic, with an absolute clarity of what cinema is, it is an individual cinema.

(My) cinema, the individual's cinema, was sharply focused on the American Avant-Garde (circa ’60/’70), a well critiqued, and admittedly a limiting and elite, closed genre of cinema. Nonetheless, it was a glorious time to be young, naive, and curious about a cinema that was defiant but rigorous, and ambitious about its commitment to “their cinema’s” place in the larger dialogues of contemporary art.

That cinema which became (my) cinema, opened a path for individuality, questioning and self-cultivation. Personally, (my) cinema, was about the pursuit of the Aesthetic Wow!, the experience of those life affirming, screening/projections that shape your eye and ear and your relation to your future in cinema. Learning from the battleground of the Avant-Garde tends to galvanize one’s ideas about what cinema can and cannot be.

(My) cinema in reduction and purity is light, time and space: rhythm or the shaping of time through projected light. Medium specificity, form, structure, poetics are what i responded to in any and all cinemas’ For sanity’s sake, I must have clarity, and resolve, in preparation for what the future of cinema will ask. The anxious questioning of a future cinema intensified with the accelerated arrival of digital technology. Only through a daily practice of engagement with digital technology, did it become apparent this was all new; new values, new aesthetics, and I would be well advised to be clear about what was learned and true about (my) cinema, but I should be prepared to leave the “old school” and return to the “new school” ...FOREVER! A Tom Sherman idea, my lesson.

As a practitioner, I approach questions about cinema’s future through intuitive daily practice and play with “new” materials, hybrids and technologies. There is not a lot of pressure about the future when one is obsessed with the work before them.

As an educator, this is where the provocation begins, as I stand back and observe these mythic complexities about cinema’s future, I am compelled to provide an optimism and enthusiasm for the next generation of practitioners; with some reserve, but not about the direction of cinema itself, but the maker’s future. With a good attitude, and an understanding of history, a clear resolve, the cinema practice of the future looks exciting with unlimited potential. Technology issues aside, there is no news there, cinema has always been driven by technology and the practitioner has always led the way. The unknown issues of cinema’s future are not in the technology and access, but the values digital technology asks and offers. With the digital revolution came a “new” democracy of making and with it a critical and cultural fragmentation.

Democracy and fragmentation has blown open the playing field, all voices are legitimate, the critic has gone home, the canon of the past is secure, the practitioner can freely play. With a digital cinema practice there is no hierarchy, there is no censor, we are closer to the “Godardian” dream of free authorship. Freedom of creation is not an issue. The real issue is what will the practitioner do with all this digital democracy and freedom of production. Will the future of cinema drown itself in its own noise, will the system trick us into an empty revolution? My concern is ultimately not for the future of cinema per say, but it’s about the future of the individual who produces the future cinema. Know and believe in your own individual cinema, and feel blessed for having a cinema you believe in.

"In the early 1990s I made the last of my 16mm films. The cost/benefit analysis of production was on my mind, but in hindsight I felt I had run the table on what I set out to do as a filmmaker, so I thought.

At the same time video entered my life. I am a teacher, I had to deal with it. I did. Video remains a part of my daily practice. Just when I thought I was done with film, a happy studio accident occurred. On hand were a shoebox of Hollywood trailers (found in a Saskatchewan drive in), a sheet of plexiglass and a window. Intuition lead to spontaneity and play. Minutes later a prototype for the Motion Picture Weaving project was realized. That was the mid 1990s, i have since made 50 plus weaves.

I have again by accident accumulated an immense archive of 16mm/35mm to draw or weave from. I feel a responsibility to ‘make good‘ of the ever rare and precious material. Every Motion Picture Weaving, for me, is a short film. The days I am weaving I feel more like a filmmaker than I ever was; all that handling and measuring of film strips over a light table, the fresh sense of composition/montage. Film material is important to me, it is what I truly understand."

Richard Kerr, The Last Days of Contrition, film still, 16mm/35mm, 35 minutes, 1988

With his project, snap,crack,pop...(less about meaning than being), for the FOFA Gallery vitrines, experimental filmmaker and Concordia University faculty member Richard Kerr will present several of his signature works from the series motion picture weavings as well as a new body of projections coupled with paint-based objects. This material iteration of the "spinning camera" technique Kerr created to present hypnotic and deeply formal concerns evoke Marcel Duchamp's rotary reliefs and early machinist modernists like Jean Tinguely and his metamechanics.

The conversation on May 16 will afford Brett Kashmere, a Pittsburgh-based filmmaker, curator and writer, the opportunity to unpack Kerr's particular path of constant production, described by Kashmere as a mix of aesthetic intensity/energy and patient observation/restraint that results in a fusion of abstraction and documentary styles.

Kashmere has selected a series of clips that will inform the discussion and provide the audience with a sense of the unique trajectory Kerr’s practice has taken. Richard Kerr began his practice in Ontario and moved through the Prairies before settling in Montreal. These sites have deeply affected his expanded cinematic practice with influences as broad as clean documentary to fully experimental and the deeply material. The evening will conclude with the screening of House Arrest, the work that leads into snap,crack,pop...(less about meaning than being), exhibition of Kerr’s work currently on view in the gallery.

Brett Kashmere is a Canadian-born, Pittsburgh-based filmmaker, curator, and writer. Combining traditional research methods with collage aesthetics, image manipulation, and personal voice-over, Kashmere's experimental documentaries explore the intersection of history and counter-memory, geographies of identity, popular culture, and the politics of representation. His curatorial projects include the touring expanded cinema installation and DVD-format catalog, Industry: Recent works by Richard Kerr; the touring retrospective Arthur Lipsett: About Time; and the multi-part film series, The Road Ended at the Beach and Other Legends: Parsing the "Escarpment School." He is currently co-editing the anthology Strange Codes: The Life and Work of Arthur Lipsett, and is the founding editor of INCITE Journal of Experimental Media. He received a BA in Film Studies from the University of Regina, as well as an MA in Film Studies and an MFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University. Kashmere has taught film production at Concordia's Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema and in the Cinema Studies Program at Oberlin College.