JG a 35mm Film Exhibition @ Arcadia University

Arcadia University will be hosting JG a new film exhibition by Tacita Dean, a British-born, Berlin-based artist, who is also an analog film activist, February 7th through April 21st.

JG is a sequel in technique to FILM, Dean’s 2011 project for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. It is inspired by her correspondence with British author J.G. Ballard (1930-2009) regarding connections between Robert Smithson’s iconic earthwork and film Spiral Jetty (both works, 1970) and Ballard’s short story The Voices of Time (1960).

The new 26-minute work is a looped 35mm anamorphic film shot on location in the saline landscapes of Utah and Southern California using Dean’s recently developed and patented system of aperture gate masking. A radical departure from her previous 16mm films, JG tries to respond to Ballard’s challenge, posed to her shortly before he died, that Dean should “treat the Spiral Jetty as a mystery her film would solve.”

For more information, visit Arcadia’s website.