VIROSA Presents:
Degenerate Cinema
Opening Saturday, March 11 from 2–5pm
The Mildred Complex(ity) Project Space, 37B Main Street, Narrowsburg, NY
VIROSA Presents:
Degenerate Cinema
Opening Saturday, March 11 from 2–5pm
The Mildred Complex(ity) Project Space, 37B Main Street, Narrowsburg, NY
In cinema, degeneracy creates new possibilities for storytelling. VIROSA works to reconfigure conventions of filmmaking, undermining longstanding barriers between cinema and the finer arts. VIROSA Presents: Degenerate Cinema shines a light on potentials beyond the event horizon of Hollywood.
Two short films are presented as part of the exhibition, Poor Magic (2020) and Fishbowl (2022). Poor Magic is VIROSA’s first narrative short, shot on location at Mildred’s Lane in winter 2020, on the cusp of the COVID-19 plague. The narrative concerns a precocious magician who tries to catch his shadow. VIROSA’s second short film is Fishbowl, named after the specimen lab at the LaBrea Tar Pits Museum in Los Angeles, where visitors observe scientists prepare remains extracted from the tar. In the film, a strange man sneaks into the museum by night to clean prehistoric specimens; his motives are unclear, as are those of an entity who watches him from the deep future.
The film screenings are interspersed by VIROSA Reels (2019-22) that showcase the collective’s moving image experiments. The exhibition also includes a new series of prints, Tar Pit Specimen (2023), featuring a 4-color silkscreen edition printed on plastic paper resembling oversize slide films. In addition to the edition is a limited series of unique, hand-painted prints that evoke the laborious process of colorizing black & white film. The print works invite reconsideration of “the screen” in expanded cinema.
Selected props from VIROSA productions are also on view. Film props are often treated as disposable material in conventional film productions, but VIROSA presents these objects as degenerate sculptures that outlive the filming process; as with radioactive decay, they are fragments emitted from an unstable center.
The costs are never-for-profit. You can make a donation through one of the following options. Every cent goes directly to supporting our most immediate needs towards establishing a land trust and becoming an official 501c3 organization that will allow Mildred’s Lane to thrive for generations to come.
Our Fiscal Sponsor (Creative Visions)
Thank you to The Silbert Foundation / The Goldman Foundation / and all supportive individuals who prefer not to be mentioned.
Photo credits / First image: FISHBOWL, 2022. Digital video, 10m 51s. Starring Austin Kase and Megan Zerga, with special thanks to the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum, Los Angeles / Second image: Phantom at Mildred’s Lane, 2022. Digital c-print on cotton paper, 18 x 24 inches (framed).
