EXHIBITIONS

SILENT FILMS & BEDROOM PAINTING
MAY 22 - AUGUST 31, 2008

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The Lab’s upcoming exhibitions explore different sources of wonder by pairing an exhibition of recent paintings with an exhibition of early short films from the 1910s. The painting exhibition explores sensual qualities of painting and the film exhibition considers the enchanting character of early silent nonfiction films. Bedroom Paintings, a term ascribed to the prominent abstract painter David Reed, refers to painting that aspires to immediate pleasurable effects. Silent Films presents films from a narrow historical period but highlights the aesthetic power of these films over their historical significance. Pairing bodies of work in two diverse mediums separated by almost a century, these exhibitions ask visitors to reflect on the extent to which history matters when looking at images.

Silent Films, featuring a continuous program of travelogue, scientific and industrial films on three side-by-side screens, presents a lesser known film genre outside of its historical context. During the silent era, short nonfiction films were some of the most frequently seen subjects in movie theaters. Yet these films are rarely seen today despite their unmistakable beauty and mystery. Travelogue phantom-ride films, as well as scientific time-lapse and slow-motion films, explored different styles of cinematic technique than fiction films, and like cinema more generally, early nonfiction films would come to be of particular interest to avant-garde artists such as the Surrealists. This exhibition separates these films from their particular context in the history of film and art and allows visitors to enjoy in them as contemporary objects of curiosity and splendor.

Bedroom Paintings examines the freedom from history in the current decade of painting. The tradition of modern painting is often described as an attempt by one generation of artists to respond to and surpass the generation that preceded them. Art historian Michael Fried noted that Édouard Manet’s work in the 1860s marked the beginning of this tendency because it involved an ''active, explicit engagement with the art of the past.'' Is that propensity now gone? To what extent are painters in the first decade of the twenty-first century reacting to their forbearers? The idea that a painting is fit for the bedroom is a way of describing its ability to appear free from the burden of art history. You hang a painting in your bedroom because it pleases you to look at it. With varying degrees of interest in the past, the artists in this exhibition explore the potential for painting to provide immediate pleasure.

Silent Films presents films from the British Film Institute, the George Eastman House, the Library of Congress, and the Netherlands Film Museum.