A LECTURE ON ANNE MCGUIRE’S STRAIN ANDROMEDA, THE
In conjunction
with Right Window Gallery’s current exhibition of new paintings from the Square
Spiral Series by Anne McGuire, please join in celebrating the 20 year anniversary of her Strain Andromeda, The with a lecture by
critic and curator Ed Halter.
Ed
Halter on Anne McGuire’s Strain
Andromeda, The
Saturday,
December 15 at 5:00pm
Right
Window Gallery
992
Valencia Street
San
Francisco, CA 94110
The
exhibition is on view, by appointment, throughout December.
“Anne McGuire’s
Strain Andromeda, The is undoubtedly
one of the greatest works of experimental cinema made in the last quarter
century. Completed at the tail-end of the analog era, Strain was painstakingly edited on a linear tape-to-tape system by
McGuire, using a commercial-release VHS release as its source. The result
consists of each shot of Wise’s 1971 feature The Andromeda Strain presented in backwards order, opening with the
film’s end titles and continuing forward towards the beginning. But this
reversed retelling is no mere conceptual conceit: Over a span of two hours, the
work’s involuted rhythms relentlessly communicate the painstaking labor that
went into its creation. It continuously jams the viewer’s normal understanding
of causality, releasing each moment to float alone in a vertiginous chasm of
unhinged time. In this schizophrenic reverie, the glowing, pulsing surface
details of Wise’s original gain a new intensity. By Strain’s end, the effect is virtually psychoactive; expect its
spectators to stumble out of the theater, their inner clocks momentarily
discombobulated.” - Ed Halter
“The square spirals come from a state of mind, not unlike the
state of mind contained in the backwards edit, its creation, and effect —each
piece of color is an edit. But each square spiral is a movie you can see all at
once. It's all there - defying time.” Anne McGuire on the Square Spiral Series
About Anne McGuire
Anne was born in the Valley of the Jolly Green Giant, and has
lived in San Francisco since the 90s. In Fall 2004, she relocated to Busan,
South Korea, where she taught video art at KyungSung University for eighteen
months. Prior to this she taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, University
of California Santa Cruz, and Stanford University. Anne started making videos
while a student. Her single channel works are much in the tradition of
personal/poetical performance to camera, playing off of the conventions of
television. She has explored the personal through formal narrative,
particularly in Strain Andromeda, The,
her first foray into disaster deconstruction. In 2006 Anne completed Adventure Poseidon, The (The Unsinking of My Ship), which
celebrates the 20-year anniversary of her very own real-life shipwreck
experience. She also writes poems and sings them as songs, and has performed as
Freddy McGuire with San Francisco-based electronic musician Wobbly, live and on
radio.
About Ed Halter
Ed Halter is a critic and curator living in New York City. He
is a founder and director of Light Industry, a venue for film and electronic
art in Brooklyn, New York, and his writing has appeared in Artforum, The
Believer, Bookforum, Cinema Scope, frieze, Little Joe, Mousse, Rhizome, Triple
Canopy, the Village Voice and elsewhere. From 1995 to 2005, he programmed and
oversaw the New York Underground Film Festival, and he has curated screenings
and exhibitions at Artists Space, BAM, the Flaherty Film Seminar, the ICA,
London, the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, PARTICIPANT INC., and Tate
Modern, as well as the cinema for Greater New York 2010 at MoMA PS1 and the
film and video program for the 2012 Whitney Biennial. He teaches in the Film
and Electronic Arts department at Bard College, and is currently writing a
critical history of contemporary experimental cinema in America.
