SIGHT UNSEEN PRESENTS
The Body Extended: Works by Scott Stark with Scott Stark in Attendance!

PROGRAM
NOEMA (16mm, 1998, 11m)
is philosopher Husserl’s term for “the meaning of an object that is formed in the domain of consciousness.” Pornographic videos are mined for the unerotic moments between moments, when the actors are engaging in an awkward change of position or when the camera pans meaningfully away from the urgent mechanisms of sex up to a cheap painting on the wall or the distant embers of a crackling fire. A piercing musical score loops endlessly throughout, and the repetitive and curious iterations of movement become furtive searches for meaning within their own blandness.

SHAPE SHIFT (DV, 2004, 2m)
A simple technique with two opposing cameras reveals a body transposed upon itself, confounding the limits of its own physical space.

SPLITTING YOU SPLITTING ME STILL (Regular-8mm film shot with 35mm still camera, 1988, silent, 8m)
Two people take turns photographing each other’s bodies; a blending of intimacy and curiosity that unfolds into rich visual textures.

I’LL WALK WITH GOD (16mm, 1993, 8m)
Using emergency information cards surreptitiously lifted from the backs of airline seats, I’ll Walk with God pictorially charts an airline flight attendant’s stoic transcendence through and beyond worldly adversity. Through an elaborate system of posturing and nuance that evokes an almost ritualistic synergy, the female protagonist(s) are shuttled toward a higher spiritual plane, carried aloft on the shimmering wings of Mario Lanza’s soaring tremolo.

THE REALIST (HD, 2013, 36m)
An experimental and highly abstracted melodrama, a “doomed love story” storyboarded with flickering still photographs, peopled with department store mannequins, and located in the visually heightened universe of clothing displays, fashion islands and storefront windows.

ABOUT SCOTT STARK
Scott Stark has produced more than 75 films and videos since 1980. Additionally, he has created a number of gallery and non-gallery installations using film and video, and elaborate photographic collages using large grids of images. Born and educated in the midwest, he has always been interested in aggressively pushing his work beyond the threshold of traditional viewing expectations, challenging the audience to question its relationship to the cinematic process; yet he also tries to build into the work elements of humor and incongruity that allow the viewer an entryway into the work while maintaining a critical distance. Both a passionate purist and a cynical skeptic, he likes to emphasize the physicality of film while cross-referencing it to the world outside the theater, attempting to lay bare the paradoxes of modern culture and the magical nature of the perceptual experience.

Scott’s films and videos have shown locally, nationally and internationally, including recent one person shows at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Pacific Film Archive. His films have won several awards including four Black Maria awards, and he recently received a San Francisco Bay Guardian Goldie Award. In 2007 Scott received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. He has taught art classes at the San Francisco Art Institute (where he also received his MFA), interweaving non-traditional uses of film and video with a variety of art disciplines. Stark served for seven years on the board of the San Francisco Cinematheque, during which time, among many other things, he co-founded the Cinematheque’s journal of film and media art, Cinematograph.

Scott has worked in a variety of motion picture media, including 8mm, super-8mm, 16mm and video. Several of his films introduced a novel technique where he ran movie film through a still camera, which, when projected, produces collage-like barrages of images and odd optically-generated soundtracks. He calls this series of films the Chromesthetic Response Series.

Scott makes his living as a computer programmer and support specialist for a large multi-national corporation. He currently lives in Austin, Texas.

For more information on Stark’s work visit:
www.scottstark.com

Sight Unseen
http://sightunseenbaltimore.com/

Event location:

425 E. 31st Street Baltimore, MD 21218

The Red Room is a volunteer-run space in Baltimore dedicated to mind-expanding experimental culture, headquartered at Normals Books and Records.