Threshold to Threshold:
Title (un)titled;
the films of Julie Murray
Saturday, October 28, 2023
Doors at 7:30pm; Show at 8pm
Threshold to Threshold is pleased to present the work of artist-filmmaker Julie Murray.
Starting as a fine art painter, over the years Murray has expanded her art-making to mixed media assemblages, sound art, and fine art films. Since the 1990s when Murray began making films, her painterly sensibility has permeated her approach and lies behind an extraordinarily unique style: poetic, philosophical, visceral. In her films, one can sense the intimate relationship between the medium and the artist through her tactile and articulated body/camera movements. Murray is also an artist who continuously develops and expands her vocabulary, including in-camera editing, collage, rephotographing images, scanning film strips and more. These techniques serve to reveal the artist’s thinking and creative process.
Among the many films Murray has made we can only select a small number to show for this event. On this program we will see seven works, including a 35mm video hybrid END REEL, two 16mm films, If You Stand With Your Back to the Slowing of the Speed of Light in Water and LINE OF APSIDES, a super 8mm film presented on video, ROOT PULL, and some digital works, including, Our eyes are armed, but we are strangers to the stars, DETROIT PARK, and 1162017 Kalona Barn Sales, IA. Note: we will watch the two 16mm films on film.
It is going to be a very special evening. We are excited to invite you to stay with us after the screening to have a conversation with Julie. Hope to see you there.
Advance tickets are encouraged.
1. If You Stand With Your Back to the Slowing of the Speed of Light in Water (16MM, SOUND, 18 MINS, 1997)
The film begins as a study of various kinds of motion. Images from an aerial tram leaving Manhattan followed by images of a nearly static bird, of bugs fighting, and of light bending as it passes through glass. The images and the editing pull in several ways at once. There are no absolutes, and even the light by which we see is altered by the material it passes through.
2. Our eyes are armed, but we are strangers to the stars (DV, SOUND, 11 MINS, 2016)
A composition of scenes and sounds in a montage reflecting poetic and musical forms. The toy camera records in a curiously velvety black and white. Its plastic lens softens and distorts detail, creating room for the mind's eye to roam and query, or not, the nature of image, meaning and attachment.
3. END REEL (35MM & Video, SOUND, 7 MINS, 2014)
The last reel of a 35mm Hong Kong action film is examined over a light-box on an editing bench using hand-crank rewinds and is recorded with a pocket camera. It shows fuzzed out fight scenes in an epic triumph of good over evil but lingers just as often on the scars and water damage blooms in the film emulsion itself.
4. DETROIT PARK (Mini DV-to-digital video, SOUND, 7 MINS, 2005)
"The enormous carcass of the Michigan Theatre, a ruin among ruins, now serves as an inner-city car park and home for ghosts.
Every city is an archaeological layer cake of demolition, decay and scandalous erection. The rise and fall of commerce spurs the reincarnation of spaces. Movie palaces are converted into tabernacles. Churches deconsecrate and become shoe stores. Graveyards are excavated and the dead are disinterred. Parking lots bloom like weeds as plentiful as churchyards. These mutated spaces funnel faded glory, waste and buried treasure; the voices of the past and interstellar space speak in gibberish." (MMcElhatten IFFR 2006)
5. 1162017 Kalona Barn Sales, IA (Video, SOUND, 5.5 MINS, 2017)
A brief portrait of Kalona IA Barn Sales in November 2017
6. ROOT PULL (Super-8 in-camera edit (screened on video), SOUND, 3 MINS, 2013)
An in-camera edit recording the struggle to uproot a shrub in the afternoon light of the evening sun.
7. LINE OF APSIDES (16MM, SILENT, 12 MINS, 2014)
Filmed at the Film Farm, Ontario in 2006 and added to over time. Objects, animate and inert, were examined through viewfinder and under a microscope and goats were interviewed daily. Thoughts coaxed into light in about the order they were encountered.
About the Artist:
Drawing upon her background in Fine Arts, filmmaker Julie Murray makes short experimental works in digital and film media which are poetical in nature, engaging the textural imprints and limits of the form as an essential element of pictorial content.
Her film and digital works have been exhibited at numerous national and international venues including the New York Film Festival, the Hong Kong International Film Festival and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. She teaches at Calarts in the School of Film Video.
Artist’s Website:
About the Curator
Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu (b. 1982, Taiwan) is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker and writer whose work is grounded in literature and the conceptual avant-garde. Cherlyn’s media-based works have been shown internationally at venues and festivals including Edinburgh International Film Festival, Helsinki Festival, Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris, 25 FPS Festival (Zagreb), Antimatter [Media Art] (Victoria, BC), Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival, Crossroads Film Festival at SFMoMA, among others. She is the curator of the film series Threshold to Threshold at Automata (LA), co-curator of Move Screen, Process Cinema, the founder of Experimentalist Media Collective, and the editor of B-Journal.
Curator’s website:
https://cherlynhsinghsinliu.com/