Artpark Movie Process & Shutter Interface

This special screening is held in conjunction with Artpark: 1974-1984 on view through December 18th at the University at Buffalo Art Gallery in the Center for the Arts. The landmark exhibition chronicles the seminal years of an innovative residency program that took place at a state park in Lewiston, New York, just north of Niagara Falls. "Artpark was a radical experiment in artist-public interaction and site-specificity that successfully balanced a populist mission with the creation of experimental art," writes curator Sandra Firmin. "During the summer months, Artpark buzzed with an eclectic array of activity that brought together rarely intersecting communities." By its second year the park hosted 15,000 visitors per week, where attendees had unique encounters with the artists at work, sometimes even participating directly in the creative process.

In 1975, two Buffalo-based media artists, Anthony Bannon and Paul Sharits, held residencies at Artpark where they produced new works that could only occur within that experimental, laboratory-like environment. Bannon, an arts critic for the Buffalo Evening News who had produced more than 15 films and videos at the time of his residency, was interested in exploring the limits of the documentary form. Sharits, a well-regarded experimental filmmaker and instructor in the Department of Media Study, took the opportunity to explore the ways cinema might function within a given multiple-screen space (an early example of what is so ubiquitous in media art installations today).

In partnership with the University at Buffalo, Hallwalls is pleased to co-present Anthony Bannon's Artpark Movie Process and Paul Sharits' 16mm film, Shutter Interface. Bannon, the former Director of the Burchfield Penney Art Center and current Executive Director of the George Eastman House in Rochester, will present the works and discuss the experience of media artists at Artpark. A close friend to Sharits (1943-1993), Bannon will also discuss the perceptual investigations of the avant-garde luminary, and the influence of the Artpark experience on his filmmaking process. Sharits' Shutter Interface was recently meticulously restored and re-installed at Greene Naftali Gallery in NYC, where it received tremendous critical acclaim.

Hallwalls' involvement with Artpark during the time period chronicled in this exhibition is well documented. Hallwalls gallery not only hosted many Artpark related activities, such as exhibitions of photographic documentation of installations (Fall 1977), but for the 1978 summer season a team from Hallwalls produced five days of exhibitions, performances, and presentations by Carol Busch, Richard Gustin, Ladd Kessler, Kate Kennedy, David Kulik, Larry Lundy, John Maggiotto, Laurie Neaman, Sue Sapienza, Armand Saiia, Kim Teirlynck, John Toth, Peggy Yunque. The screening will also include special documentation of Urban Animal, a series of performances and installations by Larry Lundy, recently transferred from small-gauge film to video. The whimsical short clearly illustrates the "vibe" of the space: collectivity and creativity in the summertime.

Many of the videos documenting artists and activities at Artpark which are featured in the exhibition are from Hallwalls video archive, housed at the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo Libraries. These fragile, analog 1/2" open-reel videos were treated and migrated to digital files at Standby (NYC). Other analog tapes on obsolete Umatic formats were made accessible by Migrating Media: Upstate Preservation Network, a partnership of Squeaky Wheel/Buffalo Media Resources, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, the Experimental Television Center, and Hallwalls.

Some publications related to this event:
December, 2010 and January, 2011 - 2010