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It is a well-worn received notion that the Sundance Film Festival has for years showcased the emerging talents in independent cinema. What has gone less noticed is the festival's flowering commitment to non-traditional forms of cinema — oft relegated to the experimental ghetto by the conventionally-minded. No longer content with the former Frontier banner, the insightful folks at Sundance have launched "New Frontier on Main," a full-fledged installation gallery with multiple rooms, sites and a venue for performance that is now in its second year.
"I think about it in terms of catching up with something that's important, something that's different, and something that really needs attention." says curator Shari Frilot. "Our cinematic culture is being hardwired in a totally different way. Cinema does not mean going to a black box anymore. This is about building an environment that resonates with our everyday experience in our new cinematic hardwire, but claiming it for art."
What is most immediately striking is the open and festive atmosphere at the venue. There are no white walls here. Comfortable furniture, dramatic lighting and shiny surfaces contribute to an environment that is more immersive than usual for a formalized art space, with the feeling of a party loft hosting a happening. Pipilotti Rist's panoramic video loop "The Saliva Ooze Away to the Underground" is a favorite rest stop for visitors who sit or recline on floor pillows as watery, superimposed images of undulating bodies and snouts surround them in a kind of post-rave virtual aquarium.
Gina Czarnecki's projections of nude dancers emphasize form and movement by pulling and bending the human body into sometime alien-like beings. Oddly reminiscent of Muybridge's early motion studies, these works take the analysis of a body in motion into the future, often resembling scientists' time-based renderings of four dimensional polygons.
Also dislocating time/space is Ragnar Kjartansson's installation, "The End." Kjartansson and fellow musician Davio Por Jonsson brought a whole new dimensionality to the concept of multi-tracking by filming themselves in various snowy regions performing parts of a tune with only a few instruments at a time. When seen together, the four screens play back the entire tune with all instruments in perfect sync. What could have played as a formalist joke is saved by its careful precision. The effect is both mind boggling and elegantly simple.
"Bordertown" by Tracey Snelling reconstructs, in miniature, a low rent border town that could be found anywhere along the Rio Grande. Motels, bars and other scruffy locales are cleverly reconstructed with tiny LCD displays placed in the windows, allowing glimpses of familiar and not so familiar cinematic scenes. It is an imagining of the secret lives that exist behind every door and window that is eerily evocative of the transience of the uncertainty zone between nations.
Farmer/Artist Matthew Moore's installation, "Lifecycles," got out of the designated locale and headed down the road to the local supermarket. His time lapse films of the planting-to-harvest duration of radishes, broccoli and other produce are installed directly above their fresh-stocked counterparts reminding the casual consumer of the simple, earthy origins of their food while dialing into the zeitgeist of food sourcing awareness.
Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt garnered much attention for his "hitRECord.org" community based media production project that brings disparate media makers together in unexpected group collaborations. The intended goal is that such spec works will sell in the future dropping a share of the coin in each of the participant's pockets. Although the decentralized democratization of film and media making is conceptually utopic, this writer remains skeptical about the qualitative success of works created without a singular authorial voice, but will be delighted to be proven wrong.
Performance artist Nao Bustamante's "Silver and Gold" articulates a hilarious reworking of the imagistic tropes of legendary provocateur Jack Smith. Dubbed a "Filmformance" the piece opens with Bustamante live narrating a video depicting herself in vaguely Egyptian garb while frolicking in nature, only to be engaged in a torturously funny chase scene involving numerous flying penises, after which she wakes from a fable-dream to discover she has grown her own bejeweled, talking phallus. Indeed a nightmare. The piece materializes into live action with a botched crime of passion that results in a suicide. Speaking from the dead, Bustamante takes the guise of pseudo-gypsy hocking necklaces made from the eponymous metals to a dazzled and disoriented audience no longer confined to a cinematic black box. ■