Cinematic Moments at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art

 

 

 

Cinematic Moments at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art

Cinematic Moments was curated by A. Will Brown, the current Kadist Curatorial Fellow. It is the first exhibition in an annual series titled The Order of Things drawn from the Kadist Art Foundation Collection. Each exhibition will be held at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts.  The exhibition begins with a small book by the artist John Miller. The book, titled Cinematic Moments, published in 1979 is a series of prosaically written descriptions of moments Miller deems cinematic.

Beginning from Miller’s text, the exhibition breaks down the structure and production of cinema into stages that are normally obscured. An exploration of the workings of a preexisting form of production, Cinematic Moments also asks what type of knowledge an exhibition is capable of producing. Cinematic Moments is constructed as an architecture that invites the viewer to step inside a moment in time.

The featured artworks are arranged in three sections, each centered on a passage from Miller’s book. In “Pre-production,” the viewer is asked to enter an environment meant to stimulate creative thinking. Here the works describe the processes of storyboarding, character development, and both the abstract and concrete spaces of idea-formation. “Production” offers a glimpse into the building of a film, with its corresponding works taking on myriad characteristics of projects that recontextualize objects, casting them in their cinematic roles as props. “Post-production,” commonly known as editing, is the process by which films are composed from their component parts. This third section offers a series of elliptical and at times false narratives built through works that describe the translation of ideas through objects, sometimes questioning the very nature of narrative itself.

Artists in the exhibition: Mauricio Ancalmo, Erick Beltrán, David Berezin, Yoan Capote, Abraham Cruzvillegas , Nathaniel Dorsky, Haris Epaminonda, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Charles Gaines, Ryan Gander, Loris Gréaud, Jiří Kovanda, Benoît Maire, Koki Tanaka, Ian Wallace, Haegue Yang.