Art Night: St Mary le Strand: Jennifer West

This is a two-part project, including a film and a film memory collection. Booking is not required.

The film is screened 5pm-2am, with a duration of approximately one hour. The film memory collection takes place 5pm-midnight at St Mary le Strand and also 8-11pm at Covent Garden Apple Market.

Jennifer West presents the new work Film Title Poem (2016) in St Mary le Strand church; an etched, hand-painted 35mm digitized film comprised of collaged words, images, patterns and glitches shot from over 500 movie title cards to a musical soundtrack. West describes the new film as "a psychic montage of my inner-history of film in alphabetical order."

The film is structured by a computer alphabetical sorting process, beginning with numbered films and moving through the list of movies in alphabetical order. The images were shot using a flashlight creating the effect of lighting the walls of a completely dark space. It is comprised of shots of individual movie titles and isolated words from the titles; these create a rhythmic word and image viewing game for the viewer, as they decipher recognisable fragments. Shot on analog 35mm film, the film celluloid of 8,000 feet of optical prints were inscribed with etched patterns, outlines, tracings, punctures and marks emphasizing the materiality of the film - using a host of unconventional tools such as forks, vegetable peelers, shards of mirror and hole punchers.

This work is part of a wider project considering the idea of the “remembered” film and how fiction weaves itself into our lives and memories – and how our viewing experience, and thus memories, has changed with the digital and Internet revolutions. Alongside the film, there will be a participatory “movie memory collection”: the public is invited to write and draw their own memories onto 70mm filmstrips – which West will later digitize to high-definition to create an animated film featuring the hand-drawn words, drawings and patterns created by the visitors.

Jennifer West (born 1966, Topanga, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles. Significant commissions include Tramway, Glasgow, 2016; Seattle Art Museum, 2016; PICA TBA Festival, Portland, 2014; High Line Art, New York, 2012, The Aspen Art Museum, 2010 and the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, 2009. West has exhibited widely in museums and art institutions internationally including: Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg; Kunstlerhaus Graz, Austria; Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Nottingham Contemporary, UK; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; CAPC, Bordeaux, France; Drawing Center and White Columns, NY and ZKM Museum for New Media, Karlsruhe.

Art Night is a new annual contemporary arts festival that transforms London for one summer night on 2 July 2016. Please see our terms and conditions.

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