Lynn Marie Kirby

A collaboration between mother and son, dance and film, an abandoned pier and summer weather, filmed in Aquatic Park, San Francisco, June 6 to August 8, 2020.

Short by Lynn Marie Kirby.

The recent work of Lynn Marie Kirby can be understood as a way of using seemingly transcendent aesthetic forms to achieve a deeper form of immanence…While Kirby is clearly an heir to the legacies of formalist modernism in film and video art, her work moves through this trajectory and back again. Like earlier experimental filmmakers, Kirby employs painterly abstraction, the radical condensation of time, and the direct registration of space on the material substrate of the medium. But she almost always uses formal schemas in order to return to the things themselves. Kirby examines the uniqueness, irreducibility, and the emotional ramifications of the particular moment, locating the palpable residues of the everyday. But like later, more systematic filmmakers such as Gehr, Akerman, and Snow, Kirby attends to the larger patterns, repetitions, and reversals that organize both perception and our lived experience.

"Documentation of landscape intervention from residency at Djerassi, all non-native plants removed except bull thistle, painted orange" -LK

Another Kirby exposure conducted in Lebanon.

Each "X" scratched into this roll of film is a prayer or wish for the repose of a person killed in Iraq. The film contains 1000 X's.

Kirby's triptych exploration on Russia, featuring her "Tangent 1926: October", "Tangent 2002: Sokurov", and "Tangent 2006: Jordan Staircase Exposure."

Kirby exposes film on the famous Jordan staircase of the Winter Palace.

A constant zooming-in renders Sokurov's "Russian Arc" into a moving mush of pixels.

Lynn Marie Kirby deconstructs footage from Eisenstein's "October."

First made as part of an evening of video and performance engaging the teacher/student relation, with my former student Harrell Fletcher, my son James and his karate teacher, Sensai Shanas. Here the video is comprised of three sections, which may play together as one piece or as stand-alone works. (Lynn Marie Kirby)

A diptych of "Chapel of the Bells Wedding Chapel Exposure" and "Pyramid Lake Piaute Reservation Exposure."

Kirby exposes film on an Indian reservation site.

Kirby exposes celluloid to the plants of the Huntington Gardens, then improvising on the footage through digital manipulation.

Celluloid exposed by light passing through the sacred space of a chapel then digitally manipulated afterwards.

Film was exposed under the light of a Jacaranda tree on a street in Los Angeles. These Brazilian transplants now populate the American landscape.

Another exposure inside a chapel from the avant-garde filmmaker Lynn Marie Kirby.

A triptych work featuring "Jacaranda Trees, Charon Road Exposure: Brazilian Transplant", "Mount St. Mary's Chapel Exposure: Galician Import", and "Huntington Gardens, Giant Stipa Exposure: Californian Native."

The filmic material was exposed, as the title suggests, at a martial arts expo in which Kirby’s young son James was undergoing his black belt examination. Here, saturated color frames reminiscent of the earlier exposure-works are disrupted by pure black-and-white scan lines and video feedback. It is a summary work, combining techniques from several different phases of Kirby's practice, and this allows Kirby’s improv strategy to achieve a new level of freedom, with certain expected formal gestures disrupted by whole new frames of reference. (Michael Sicinski)

Lynn Marie Kirby’s Lenten Light Conversions is a “hybrid” work, created first by exposing raw film to light inside St. Ignatius during the forty days between Lent and Easter, then edited on digital video. --Michelle Hyun

The Time Dilation series works in the slippage between and through frames, the gaps and glitches between recording systems and histories. Each manifestation of digital break-up is evidence of technology’s material fragility as well as an articulation of the content. Concerned with a temporality determined by the "in-time-ness" of things, rather than drama or characters, this series of videos captures the cyclical and circular nature of life as it unfolds in both domestic and geographic sites.

This evocative abstract work was created with a series of what could be considered "wrong" actions. First the artist exposed blank, undeveloped 16mm film to sunlight on San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. The film was then converted to video without removing any of the typically undesirable elements of the moving image: the head and tail of the film, the video scan lines, and other remnants and visual noise. Each element is instead emphasized, and they become primary visual components of the work. The resulting images flashing on the screen are as fleeting as the sunlight they record and as fragmented as the collective memory of an American landmark.

This is a seven-day excerpt of a year-long project in which I recorded my daily sweeping after breakfast. I think of this piece as a collaboration across time with Maya Deren and her film, Study in Choreography for Camera from 1945.

A meditation on the female body in culture.

This is a film about the language and perception of love and romance. The film blurs the line between fact and fiction, personal and cultural experience.

Fields of Grain, 1984 – ongoing project/ sound:.For twenty years I have collected 16mm footage from travels around the US: a ride down the Cuyahoga River, shots of Civil War battlefields, walks through fields of growing flowers, grain and fruit, water systems, rail systems, malls and parades, and kudzu growth in Mississippi. This project mixes traditions of landscape cinema with improvisational real-time editing and digital to analog “glitches” to make transparent an archiving and representation process, my own road movie archive.

A film by Lynn Marie Kirby

A film about light and aggression, heat and religion; she ascends from the piano.

A film about a woman's choice whether or not to have children and state funding of abortion.