Visiting Film/ Video Artists & Speakers Series Fall 2023:

Madison Brookshire, Number Series

Tuesday, September 19, 2023, Lecture Hall 6, 7:00 PM Free Admission.

In addition to 16mm, works in the Number Series use elements of experimental music composition and performance to create hybrid forms. They move uncomfortably, if productively, between both/and and neither/nor: both cinema and music, neither film nor performance. They could be considered “expanded cinema,” or “paracinema,” as Ken Jacobs refers to it, work that engages with the idea of cinema and includes performative elements. But in some ways, they stretch even that expansive definition: that is, they are “expanded” in that they involve performance and/or multiple projectors but, counterintuitively, this expansiveness creates less, not more. Their expansion does not add anything to cinema; in fact, at times they even deemphasize the visual to reveal what is suppressed by the image. The result is a series of cinematic situations that extend an invitation to feel the passage of time.

Madison Brookshire lives in Los Angeles, where he makes films, paintings, and performances. His work invites viewers to become aware of perceptual processes and the sensuous experience of time. Finding sympathies between experimental film, music, and art, he investigates hybrid forms, often inhabiting the areas at the edges of disciplines, where they begin to touch and vibrate one another. He frequently works with musicians and composers, such as Ezra Buchla, LCollective, Laura Steenberge, Mark So, and Tashi Wada. His films, videos, performances, and installations have been shown at Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival; Anthology Film Archives; Artists’ Television Access; the Block Museum of Art; Human Resources; ISSUE Project Room; Los Angeles Filmforum; The Lab; Light Field; Microscope Gallery; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; REDCAT; Union Docs; and the wulf., among others. He has had solo exhibitions at Parker Jones; Culver City; Parthenia Projects; Northridge; and Presents Gallery, Brooklyn. His awards include being named a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts, and ARC grant from the Center of Cultural Innovation, a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Arts grant, and being an Artist in Residence at the Echo Park Film Center and the Hammer Museum.