EASTER MORNING

2008 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

Bruce Conner

location: San Francisco, California
year born: 1933
gender: male
nationality: American
home town: McPherson, Kansas

Unlike many of his earlier films which often present poignant critiques of mass media and its deleterious effects on American culture, EASTER MORNING , Conner’s final video work before his death in 2008, constitutes a far more meditative filmic essay in which a limited amount of images turn into compelling, almost hypnotic visual experience. The video presents us with a reinterpretation of footage from his unreleased avant-garde film, Easter Morning Raga , from 1966. In contrast to his more famous pieces like A Movie (1958) and Crossroads (1976) which are juxtapositions of fragments from newsreels, soft-core pornography, and B movies, the images in EASTER MORNING serve as a reinterpretation of footage. Here the artist expands the images in duration, gauge, and frame rate, which results in an enigmatic visual transcendence, or “imagelessness,” and distances the viewers from their preconceptions of what they are watching. Accompanied by rhythmical music, the collision of images in EASTER MORNING is not only testament to Conner’s ability to balance order and chaos, control and chance, but further reveals his abiding interest in alternative ways of seeing and experiencing.


Bruce Conner was undoubtedly one of the key figures of America’s avant-garde art scene since his work emerged in the late 1950s. Affiliated with the beat community, he was overtly opposed to the academic establishment and worked freely in a variety of media, including drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, photography, and assemblage. However, Conner is most recognized for his films in which he created a unique visual montage through the skillful and pioneering editing of found footage.


Colors:



Nuevo Dragon City
© » KADIST

Sergio De La Torre

2008

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This is not in Spanish
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Sergio De La Torre

2011

This is not in Spanish looks at the ways in which the Chinese population in Mexico navigates the daily marginalization they encounter there...

Frontier-Linear
© » KADIST

Doug Aitken

2009

The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009...

Lowrider Builder and Child
© » KADIST

Liz Cohen

2012

The photographic work Lowrider Builder and Child is a companion piece to the video Hydroforce , which features Cohen in the late stage of her pregnancy posing atop a German car that she transformed into a lowrider in a period of ten years...

Victory at Sea
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Colter Jacobsen

2007

Victory at Sea is a simple mechanism made from cardboard and found materials that mimics the Phenakistoscope, an early cinematic apparatus...

Gerald Hughes, a.k.a. Savage Fantasy’; about 25 years old
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Philip-Lorca diCorcia

For this series, Philip-Lorca diCorcia walked along Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles in search of models who would be prepared to pose in hotel rooms according to pre- planned scenarios...

Forest Gathering N.2
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Gregory Crewdson

2005

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Visalia Livestock Market, Visalia, California
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Sharon Lockhart

2011

Visalia Livestock Market, Visalia, California results from Lockhart’s prolonged investigation of an agricultural center and community...

VFGY9
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Larry Bell

1979

Like many of Larry Bell’s works, VFGY9 deals primarily with the viewer’s experience of sight...

One Must
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John Baldessari

1997

In One Must , an image of a pair of scissors, accompanied by the words of work’s title, poses an ominous question about the relationship between the image and the text...

I (heart) Data Mining
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Amy Balkin

2012

Data mining is a computer software process that can involve the neutral or benign analyzing of internet data for patterns, however, it can also imply the more sinister activities of surveillance or subject-based information gathering...

Behold These Glorious Times!
© » KADIST

Trevor Paglen

2017

Trevor Paglen’s ongoing research focuses on artificial intelligence and machine vision, i.e...

Mom
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Sadie Benning

2017

In borrowing and subverting images from popular culture, Sadie Benning exposes the media’s role in constructing false and oppressive stereotypes of women, with regard to gender and sexual identity...

Untitled 3737 and Untitled 5157
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Todd Hido

2005

The two pieces in the Kadist Collection depict foggy landscapes, one at dawn, the other at nighttime...

Untitled (Wheelchair drawing)
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Edgar Arceneaux

2006

Untitled (Wheelchair Drawing) is a ten-foot photo transfer of the image of a wheelchair with burning embers in its seat...

VertiGhost
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Lynn Hershman Leeson

2017

Using the seminal 1958 film Vertigo as a launchpad, Lynn Hershman Leeson explores the blurred lines between fact and fantasy in VertiGhost , a film commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco...

Scene I am Cuba
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Felipe Dulzaides

2006

I Am Cuba— “Soy Cuba” in Spanish; “Ya Kuba” in Russian—is a Soviet/Cuban film produced in 1964 by director Mikhail Kalatozov at Mosfilm...