Screening of FOOD by Gordon Matta-Clark

Sunday, October 2nd 7pm : Screening at Microscope Gallery, a LIVE / WORK SPACE event

Food by Gordon Matta-Clark

1972, 43 min, b&w, 16 mm film on video

This film documents the legendary SoHo restaurant and artists' cooperative Food, which opened in 1971. Owned and operated by Caroline Goodden, Food was designed and built largely by Matta-Clark, who also organized art events and performances there. As a social space, meeting ground and ongoing art project for the emergent downtown artists' community, Food was a landmark that still resonates in the history and mythology of SoHo in the 1970s.

Camera and Sound: Robert Frank, Suzanne Harris, Gordon Matta-Clark, Danny Seymour. Editing: Roger Welch

 Dwellings: Charles Simonds by Rudy Burckhardt 
 1974, 12 min, color, 16mm film
American sculptor and architect Charles Simonds is seen during the winter of 1974 when he spent his days among the devastated tenements and vacant lots of Manhattan's Lower  East Side, sculpting clusters of miniature dwellings for an imaginary civilization. These  structures are nestled in crevices of deteriorating buildings and crumbling sidewalks: his work evokes themes of survival, dependency, fragility and visionary idealism. 

Phantom Highway  

A Slide Show by Katherin McInnis

Sunday, September 18th at 7pm

Microscope Gallery

4 Charles Place

Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY

Phantom Highway traces the path of the never-built Bushwick Expressway. Planned by Robert Moses in 1955 as part of federal Interstate 78, the expressway  — connecting the Williamsburgh Bridge to routes to JFK — was scheduled for completion by 1975, but shelved by 1971. Following the freeway’s path tells a story of displacement and disinvestment, met with community resilience and reinvention.


* shown with *

New York Portrait #1 by Peter Hutton, 1978-79, 16mm
“Hutton’s sketchbook of mid-1970s New York, edited in three parts over twelve years, is a chronicle of indelible impressions and an act of urban archeology. The artist evokes the city’s delicate rhythms, tonal contrasts, and shifts of scale—scrims of white mist and black smoke, of gauze, cloud, and fluttering pennant; the shadowy geometries of tenements and water towers; palimpsests of graffiti, skywriting, and painted signs; ecstatic sunlight glinting off the wings of homing pigeons as they traverse a pillowy sky; the slight rustle of a homeless man’s shirt; the flowery patterns of rainwater draining from a flooded street; a blimp’s lazy progress between two buildings whose balconies resemble film sprockets; and a winter fog rolling over the sandy rivulets of Coney Island, making of it a lunar park, removed from time.” – Josh Siegel, Associate Film Curator, MoMA

Spirit by Jem Cohen, 2007, 7:30

"...The film is a domestic portrait of Patti and her son, Jackson. William Blake was invited in the form of a plaster cast of his death mask. Kurt Cobain, (conflicted, fierce, gentle, and another mother’s son) was invited as an admirer of Leadbelly. Cats were invited as household saints. The film invokes New York and rural America. It is about picking up guitars and doing dirty dishes." – Jem Cohen  

Available Properties by Mary Billyou 2011

A real estate film from the East Riviera.

The Commoners by Jessica Bardsley + Penny Lane 2009
In 1890, a wealthy eccentric named Eugene Schieffelin collected every bird ever mentioned by Shakespeare and released them into Central Park. The only one to survive in the New World was the European Starling, now among the commonest – and most despised – birds in America. The Commoners is an essay film about European Starlings, poetry, the rhetorical relationship between nationalism and environmentalism, and the paths people forge through history as they attempt to improve the natural world.

This screening is held in conjunction with the current exhibit LIVE / WORK SPACE at Camel Art Space: a show of collaborative pieces revealing the productive qualities of shared conversations and the possibilites of liminal space.

six dollars