A Wilderness of Mirrors: Films by Paul Clipson
A selection of stunning works by San Francisco-based filmmaker Paul Clipson, displaying his unique vision to transform the everyday into phantasmagoric celluloid landscapes. Hosted in partnership with LOMAA & Forest City Gallery.
PROGRAM
SPHINX ON THE SEINE
2009 | 16mm *originally shot on Super 8 | colour/B&W | 7.5 minutes | music by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
A series of brief, but enigmatic images taken from around the world. Images suggesting the first moments of dream-sleep, following one after the other, but geographically spanning thousands of miles and large passages of time between each cut.
UNION
2011 | 16mm * originally shot on Super 8 | colour/B&W | 14.5 minutes | music by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
An exploration of movement, woven into layers of time, and photographed in natural and nocturnal urban spaces, ambiguous within a confluence of lights, colors and darkness. Filmed in the parks of San Francisco.
ANOTHER VOID
2012 | 16mm * originally shot on Super 8 | colour | 11 minutes | music by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
Orpheus meets the bird with the crystal plumage. Filmed at night in San Francisco, this study of the eye in vertiginous color and darkness, broadens and intensifies an exploration into in-camera processes of handheld, small gauge filmmaking, and the rhythmic and graphic relationships of multilayered imagery to music-making and dreams.
LIQUID CASKET/WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS
2014 | 16mm | colour/B&W | 9.5 minutes | music by Lawrence English
A restless, traveling consciousness flies across lands vast and small, taking note of possible futures that hint at humankind’s folly of expansion and alienation. Filmed in London, Leeds, Glasgow and Scotland.
MADE OF AIR
2014 | 16mm | colour/B&W | 11.5 minutes | music by Grouper
A sad and fearful lament for a drowned world. Filmed in London, Zurich, San Francisco, Berkeley and Napa.
Artist Bio
Paul Clipson is a San Francisco-based filmmaker who often collaborates with sound artists and musicians on films, live performances, and installations. His Super 8 and 16mm films aim to bring to light subconscious visual preoccupations that reveal themselves while working in a stream of consciousness manner, combining densely layered, in-camera edited studies of figurative and abstract environments, in a process that encourages unplanned-for results, responding to and conversing with the temporal qualities of musical composition and live performance.
He has completed dozens of short films since the early 2000’s and his work has screened around the world in festivals and at sound & film events such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The New York Film Festival and the Cinémathèque Française. Clipson has recently been touring his feature-length sound/16mm collaboration HYPNOSIS DISPLAY internationally with Liz Harris (Grouper).
This program is supported in part by the London Arts Council through the City of London’s Community Arts Investment Program.