Stan Brakhage, still from Kindering, 1987. Courtesy of the Estate of Stan Brakhage & www.fredcamper.i h a g C is one of the most influential filmmakers of all time. A l o n g with a dozen or so other artists of the 1950s and early 60s avant-garde, he expanded the possibilities of film toward the limits and into the limitations of the medium. In fact, early Brakhage films were so much at odds with mainstream film of the period that they effectively inhabited a different cinematic universe. In his prolific w o r k i n g life, Brakhage completed approximately 3 8 0 films before his death in 2 0 0 3 . W h i l e most of his w o r k is intentionally silent, emphasizing a purely visual experience, the four films in this exhibition from the late 80s and early 90s explore Brakhage's ideas on the cinematic possibilities of sound. He once said that artists should disregard the strengths of a medium, for the sake of aesthetics. F i l m , he thought, should exist "free of photographic animation . . . of the outright fakery of the illusion of movie pictures." H e implied that by attacking its shortcomings, art w o u l d advance. A n d he did this, intuitively and consciously, for fifty years, in the process making films that are deeply connected Stan Brakhage, still from Christ Mass Sex Dance, 1991. Courtesy of the Estate of Stan Brakhage & www.fredcamper.com to photography and its history. Carolce Schncemanil's art has been operating in the cross-over zones between performance and painting, f i l m m a k i n g and photography, the body and the theatre, since the 1960s. H e r performances had a liberating effect that prepared the ground for a generation of younger artists and she has described her art as a pleasurable weapon, a missile sent into our repressive culture. Carolee Schneemann's w o r k has evolved in relation to her dream-life. In some ways this reliance on the sub-conscious is part of the legacy o f the 1960s that can be seen in her new w o r k as w e l l , and in the w o r k that she and Stan Brakhage discussed in their letters from 1960 to the 1990s. In D E V O U R , Schneemann brings the vitality of her past w o r k that analyzed the role of the domestic in the public, but re-contextualized here in the collapse of public order, the threat to society and individuals posed by global events, and the similarity of today's barbarism to the barbarism of the past. Stan Brakhage, still from Kindering, 1987. Courtesy of the Estate of Stan Brakhage & www.lredcamper.com WHAT: DEVOUflby Carolee Schneemann & About Time · Four Late Stan Brakhage Films, by Stan Brakhage. WHERE: Presentation House Gallery, 3rd & Chesterfield WHEN: March 11-April9 SPECIAL EVENT: Marilyn Brakhage, Mark Harris, Bill Jeffries discuss Stan Brakhage's life and work. Saturday March 25,4pm MORE INFO: 604.986.1351 orwww.presentationhousegall.com 16 March I April