Visiting Film/ Video Artists & Speakers Series Spring 2024:

Tara Nelson, Select Works, 21 min

Tuesday, April 4, 2024, Lecture Hall 6, 7:00 pm, Free Admission

Tara Nelson is a filmmaker, curator, programmer, and lecturer working with film and digital media. At Visual Studies Workshop, Tara oversees the cataloging, preservation, and interpretation of the VSW collections. She is the lead programmer for the VSW Salon and the Managing Editor of VSW Press.

Luther Price (January 26, 1962 – June 13, 2020) was a prolific artist whose work explored the deepest, darkest corners of the human experience. Working in film, performance, sculpture, photography and mixed media, his haunting images were often composed from found elements, thickly layered with ink, paint, glue, tape, and bodily fluids. Price’s films are sculptural compositions in which images of eviscerated bodies, raw meat, hardcore gay porn, and laughing clowns occupy the same psychic space as quiet scenes of street corners, blue skies, and empty clotheslines.

Luther Price’s stunning work with slides is documented in New Utopia and Light Fracture by Luther Price, a 2023 VSW Press publication featuring copious images derived from the depths of Price’s 35mm collages as well as intimate email correspondence from Price to VSW editor Tate Shaw 2017–18 and an essay by Ed Halter of Light Industry, Brooklyn. In celebration of this publication, Tara Nelson, VSW Curator and Managing Editor for the VSW Press is presenting two sets of Price’s double-projected slides—New Utopia and Light Fracture (both 2017), which Luther Price donated to the VSW archives in 2017. Tara will speak on the publication, the slides, and on Price.