Beebe Berlin
Roger Beebe is a filmmaker whose work since 2006 consists primarily of multiple-projector performances and essayistic videos that explore the world of found images and the "found" landscapes of late capitalism. He has screened his films around the globe at such unlikely venues as the CBS Jumbotron in Times Square and McMurdo Station in Antarctica as well as more likely ones including Sundance and the Museum of Modern Art with solo shows at Anthology Film Archives, The Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City, and Los Angeles Filmforum among many other venues. His work has been supported by residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony and elsewhere.
Next week, Wim Roefs welcomes innovative film professor Roger Beebe to the If Art Gallery on Lincoln Street for a performance of Films for One to Eight Projectors and Jasper plans to be in the house. Artists and patrons of all arts disciplines are invited to attend and would be wise to do so. Film has a unique way of spurring creativity that stems from its multi-sensory stimulation, usually presented in an immersive environment, that scholars are still trying to understand. Here’s an opportunity to do some research on your own.
From If Art -
“Roger Beebe's films provide an exciting opportunity to explore new boundaries within film, performance and installation,” University of South Carolina media arts professor Carleen Maur says. “His films provide an experience that asks audiences to explore complex spatial, sonic and image relationships.” Ohio State art professor Beebe will present a film performance at if ART Gallery, Columbia, SC, on Wednesday, March 2, 2002, at 7:00 pm. Suggested donation is $5.
Beebe will operate and perform with several 16mm film projectors, showing several new works alongside some of his best-known projector performances. The latter will include the seven-projector, show-stopping Last Night of the Dying Stars of 2008/2011. Beebe also will include a sampling of recent essayistic videos, presented as live-narrated documentaries. Topics will include a range from the forbidden pleasures of men crying to the racial politics of font choices and the real spaces of virtual economy.
“Beebe’s films are both erudite and punk, lo-fi yet high-brow shorts that wrestle with a disfigured, contemporary American landscape,” Atlanta’s Creative Loafing wrote. The Independent Weekly said that Beebe’s “implicitly and explicitly evoke the work of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, all photographers of the atomic age whose Western photographs captured the banalities, cruelties and beauties of imperial America."
Beebe has since 2007 had more than 130 solo exhibitions all over the United States and abroad, the latter in Mexico, Finland, Spain, France, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Germany and the United Kingdom.
