Selected Film Excerpts Compilation (2011-13) (2011)
By Jennifer West
“Saline bodies, water. Buckets, film. Materiality, memory. Erosion, elision. Time, travel. Spiral, Jetty. Salt Lake, Dead Sea. Jennifer West’s fervent materialism is by now well documented—strewn as her films are with materials, which she then indexes in her paragraph-long titles—as are the dialectical relationships she plumbs with awesome hallucinatory fever. Likewise, her films Spiral of Time Documentary Film and Salt Crystals Spiral Jetty Dead Sea Five Year Film (both 2013) materialize—no, metabolize—more of these things. Travelogues in the elliptical way that Tony Conrad’s black painted frames on paper, his seventies-era “Yellow Movies,” were movies, West’s recent films are admixtures of shot images and abstract, material traces, in the acid-y palette that is her signature. But if her previous works conjured the early abstract cinema of Hans Richter and Walter Ruttmann, among others, her new works were conceived in spirit with Robert Smithson and Chris Marker, and their poetic, speculative travelogues—sculptural and cinematic, respectively—that were both cosmically and earthily concerned with place and time.” –Quinn Latimer for Vdrome.org, 2015
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