FILMS/
SCOTT ARFORD: STATIC LIFE
Spotlight: Kinotek
USA, 2008, 68 minutes
SHOWTIMES
Wed, May 7 / 7:15 / Kabuki / SCOT07K
CREDITS
- dir
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Scott Arford
- prod
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Scott Arford
- cam
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Scott Arford
- editor
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Scott Arford
- mus
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Scott Arford
- source
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Scott Arford, 1814 Illinois St., San Francisco, CA 94124. EMAIL: scott@7hz.com
Over the last decade-plus, Scott Arford has quietly been shaping the Bay Area’s new media culture, producing video and musical works, developing exhibition spaces and engineering at (among other places) Recombinant Media Labs. This program presents Arford’s artistic practice through both a retrospective and his latest multimedia performance, Still Life (almost) Another Day in Three Acts. One trope reworked throughout Arford’s artistic career is that of “static.” Arford’s incredibly soothing, ethereal pieces conjure stillness and contemplation. But Arford also visualizes the intense dance of minute structures like electrical static that appears when objects are closely examined. His works tend to oscillate between the poles of movement and stasis, and Still Life is no different in this regard. In it Arford edits and condenses a classic Italian horror film, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (directed by genre master Jorge Grau), into a super slo-mo series of stills. He transforms the violent epic into a rich visual feast, while composing a new soundtrack for it live and onstage. The zombie film is a perfect vehicle for Arford’s interests, as he kills the film and brings it back to life—the undead being both a little more still and intense.
Works presented:
Untitled Static 1, Untitled Static 2, Untitled Static 3 (2005, 3 min); Airports for Lights, Shadows and Particles (1995, 8 min); Airports 2 (2003, 9 min); Static Room (excerpt) (2002–2006, 4 min); 7 Illinois Street (2006, 18 min); Still Life (almost) Another Day in Three Acts (2007, 28 min)
—Sean Uyehara
Total running time 85 min. Presented in association with the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
