Screening:
Michael Robinson

Michael Robinson’s works bring together images and sounds from a wide range of original and pop-culture sources, forging new and uncanny correspondences. He blends film and video to create lyrical narratives that are equally opulent and restrained, their parent materials pulsing in and out of abstraction. For These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us, footage of Elizabeth Taylor’s 1963 Hollywood epic Cleopatra is seamlessly combined with images of Michael Jackson’s mid-1990s Egyptomania, culminating in a mesmerizing phantasmagoria of hypnotic color strobe. Line Describing Your Mom—its title a cheeky nod to Anthony McCall’s canonical “solid-light” film Line Describing a Cone (1974)—sets altered footage of amateur liturgical choreography to the sounds of a woman’s YouTube confessional. Here and elsewhere, Robinson makes familiar media strange again, exploring collective memory through a poetics of devotion and loss.

SCREENING TIMES
March 7, 8, and 10
12, 2, and 4 pm
March 9
2, 4, and 7 pm
March 11
12 and 2 pm

PROGRAM
Victory over the Sun, 2007
16mm film, color, sound; 12:30 min.
All Though the Night, 2008
Digital video, color, sound; 4:20 min.
Hold Me Now, 2008
Digital video, color, sound; 5 min.
If There Be Thorns, 2009
16mm film transferred to digital video,
color, sound; 13:20 min.
These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us, 2010
Digital video, color, sound; 13 min.
Line Describing Your Mom, 2011
Digital video, color, sound; 5:50 min.

Screenings are free with Museum admission. Admittance is on a first-come, first-seated basis until capacity is reached. Late admittance is strongly discouraged, so please arrive early.