Light Spill: An Installation by Gibson + Recoder

January 13–March 26, 2017

Media Arts Watch Gallery

For the collaborative artists Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder, a film is not an event that unfolds over time, but a particular material experience. In the two works on view, Light Spill and Threadbare, the artists dismantle the components of the filmmaking system (celluloid, projector, screen, and light) and recombine them in new ways. As Gibson’s and Recoder’s work suggests, film is not only about images, storytelling, and entertainment, but also possesses optical, mechanical, and sculptural dimensions.

The artists encase a 16mm projector with film, mummifying the object with its own innards. “A still life of motion picture phenomena,” Threadbare offers a new way to look at film, not as a moving image but as a motionless and silent sculptural object.

As film artists in an age of digital image-making, Gibson + Recoder avoid nostalgia and irony in their work, and instead take a refreshingly direct, almost archaeological approach to the medium. They offer viewers new ways of seeing and experiencing the moving image.