[Frameworks] JEFF KEEN NYC

[john porter]

Hi,

> To refer to documentation of Jeff Keen and screening times
> of the film program, please visit our new website
> at www.elizabethdee.com

I tried that w/o luck. The website's difficult to navigate and I couldn't find any mention of the screenings.
Thanks, John.

John Porter, Toronto, Canada
http://www.super8porter.ca/
super8porter at yahoo.ca


> From: Jack Sargeant <jack at jacktext.net>
> Subject: [Frameworks] JEFF KEEN NYC
> To: "Experimental Film Discussion List" <frameworks at jonasmekasfilms.com>
> Received: Monday, January 2, 2012, 3:53 PM
> 
> For everybody
> in New York, the underground filmmaker Jeff Keen is having a
> major retrospective of paintings and films. Check it
> out. 
> Jack
> 
> 
> JEFF KEEN
> Works from the 1960s + 1970s
> 
> January 12 – February 11, 2012
> Opening Thursday, January 12, 6-8PM
> 
> Elizabeth Dee Gallery is pleased to announce the first solo
> exhibition at the gallery and United States debut of
> paintings and films by Jeff Keen [b. 1923, UK]. This
> important first exhibition in New York will explore in depth
> Keen's most influential and fundamental period of work,
> the 1960s and 1970s, during which he established a prolific
> visual practice extending to five decades of drawing,
> painting, experimental film, concrete poetry and
> performance.
> 
> Keen is primarily known as a legendary underground
> filmmaker whose work and activities coincided with the
> emergence of expanded cinema. He was one of the original
> participants in the 60s at the London Filmmakers Co-op. The
> BFI and later the British Arts Council supported and enabled
> Keen to make films and devise a multitude of drawings and
> paintings. During this period, Keen maintained jobs as a
> landscaper in the Parks and Recreation department of his
> hometown, Brighton, and sometimes as a postal worker
> delivering mail. The artist made movies primarily on
> weekends with his family and friends in an ensemble cast and
> his painting and drawing studio was for 40 years a
> repository of props and art that accumulated to
> extraordinary effect that has been fully documented.
> 
> Embracing the increasingly available technology of 8mm,
> 16mm and prevelance of American Pop imagery and Comics [and
> later Punk], Keen employed modes of popular media,
> technology and music in painting, drawing and collage using
> a stop frame animation process and in camera editing,
> resulting in active and evocative films. Utilizing a
> frequency of speed not found in work of the period, Keen,
> through the possibilities of the medium, brought new life to
> the significance of radical visual media.
> 
> Keen was able to merge Surrealist and Dadaist ideology with
> a social-political critique of American consumerism with the
> spontaneity of the Beat and 60s era. These works are avid
> responses to an overwhelming sense of increasingly
> proliferating media and commodification during the decade.
> He often explored his experiences surviving World War II in
> this material, focusing on monuments of power and the
> ever-present war within the artist as individual. This took
> the form of invented characters or corporations [i.e. Rayday
> Films] with brands, personas or protagonists in a fractured
> narrative style. Performative and reminiscent of
> Surrealism's influence on his formative period in the
> 1950s, Keen additionally drew from English Romanticism and
> his love of language to devise a novel method of working in
> a newly evolving medium.
> 
> Keen's work can be viewed today as prescient to modes
> of film and video that began to take cultural references
> into an exploration of our own larger social portraiture.
> His enthusiastic embrace of alternative modes of discourse
> in a pre-internet age is astoundingly fresh today, and the
> diversity of his practice calls to mind both painters, film
> and video artists who succeeded him, from such figures as
> Derek Jarman, Richard Hamilton and Linder, to American
> artists such as Jack Smith, Ryan Trecartin and Peter
> Saul. 
> 
> Jeff Keen very rarely exhibited his drawings and paintings.
> He first showed Rayday Film [1968 - 1970] in the First
> International Underground Film Festival at the National Film
> Theatre in 1970. Upcoming 2012 exhibitions include a
> retrospective at the Brighton and Hove Museum, the National
> Portrait Gallery, London and Tate Modern, London. 
> 
> In conjunction with the Jeff Keen exhibition, we are
> pleased to announce a special initiative for 2012, the first
> of an ongoing series of collaborations with galleries who
> share common philosophies and interests. Anke Kempkis of
> BROADWAY1602 will be our first collaborator to inaugurate
> the series with the related exhibition, Façade is Cracking:
> Jeff Keen Drawings from the 1950s. This exhibition will
> include film related assemblages and documentation along
> with rare works on paper at her gallery, located at 1181
> Broadway [3rd Floor] in conjunction with the solo
> exhibition, Anna Molska Glasshouses. The exhibitions open on
> January 14 and extend to February 28, 2012 with an afternoon
> reception from 3 - 6 on Saturday, January 14. For more
> information, please contact BROADWAY1602 at www.broadway1602.com or
> +1.212.481.0362.
> 
> To refer to documentation of Jeff Keen and screening times
> of the film program, please visit our new website at www.elizabethdee.com. 
> 
> Film Program Selections:
> Flick Flack [1964 - 1965, 3 min]
> Cineblatz [1967, 3 min]
> White Lite [1968, 3 min]
> Marvo Movie [1968, 5 min]
> Meatdaze [1967, 5 min]
> Rayday Film [1968 - 70 + 1976, 13 min]
> White Dust [1972, 33 min]
> Mad Love [1978, 42 min]
> 
> The gallery would like to extend special thanks to Stella
> Keen and James Mackay for making this exhibition possible
> and to Anke Kempkis for her dedicated collaboration on this
> project. 
> 
> For more information: please contact the gallery at
> +1.212.924.7545 
> 
> 545 West 20th Street
> New York NY 10011
> +1 212 924 7545
> info at elizabethdee.com
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> 
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