Forum expanded Talk and Show:
Episode 6: The Space Between Seeing and Knowing is Haunted
12.02. 10:00 Arsenal 1 (admission free)
The 1975 made-for-television film The Ghost of Flight 401 was at one point on YouTube: broken into ten parts, in low resolution and degenerated. Time has not been kind to it, but neither had its original budget. Here is a "true story" about a plane crash, a haunting, and a séance, yet it is without special effects and is resolved (or resigned) to be "character driven" in spite of a thin script. The film’s main premise is that the dead – in this case a pilot played stoically by Ernest Borgnine – sometimes hover close to the objects they knew in life.
The central premise of Psychometry was to distribute the film in parts amongst a group of artists. They have been asked to consider these salvaged pieces in their contributions, knowing that the ghost of the film will hover about it.
The exhibition's curator, D-L Alvarez, asked a range of people to participate and the breadth of mediums reflect that: sculpture, video, super8, photography, installation, fiction, performance, sound works, and an animated gif. Also wide are the subjects they address: mourning, life after death, disaster films, Seventies' Florida, the tensions between the real story of the crash and the fictional version of the film, the actors in the film and the paths they (or their names) have traveled, and psychometry. The term "psychometry" was coined in 1842. It is a theory that all things give off an emanation of their history.
2009, video and sound works, collages, performances, text
D-L Alvarez is a visual artist and writer born in Stockton, California.
a project including works by Anne McGuire, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Philip Marshall, Patty Chang, Jennifer Locke, Wayne Smith, Craig Goodman, Nao Bustamonte, Jack Falanga, Mike Kitchell, Kim Brauer, Brenna Murphy, Benjamin Alexander Huseby, Adrian Hermanides, Stephen Beachy, Alexandre Estrela, Stanley Lieber and Aykan Safoglu.
