The Changeover System: A Projection Performance Installation
Prepared Projection by Gibson + Recoder
Material Sound by Richard Garet
TICKETS
“Gibson and Recoder have created one of the most sustained and sophisticated treatments of film of their generation. Rather than being wrapped in nostalgia or irony, their work is refreshingly direct in characterizing celluloid as a material that does not fit into a singular path through the projector and is not dedicated only to creating a cinematic representation of the world.” – John Hanhardt, “The End(s) of Film”
The acclaimed collaborative artist duo Gibson + Recoder showcase their most recent expanded cinema project, The Changeover System: A Projection Performance Installation. The ambitious multi-projection work is premised on Gibson + Recoder’s two-decade apprenticeship into the untapped possibilities in the theatrical projection of 35mm celluloid. In The Changeover System the artists repurpose the cinematic apparatus from within the concealed projection booth chamber through a practice they refer to as “prepared projection,” calling attention to the creative agency of the moving picture palace itself. In his essay on the artists for the Celluloid exhibition catalogue, media scholar and curator John Hanhardt captures the essence of their inquiry into the medium of film: “In their ontological investigation and poetic recouping of film, they refuse to be caught up in avant-garde tropes, but instead move away from the cinematic, to transform the entire filmmaking system into a dismantled found object, an object discovered as a lost language of image making.” For this unique iteration of The Changeover System at the Sun-Ray Cinema, Gibson + Recoder incorporate into their prepared projection a selection of feature films from the festival director’s personal film collection.
“Like ancient linotype machines that sit in museums, or vacant factories that onceproduced and developed films, Gibson and Recoder’s work is a reflection of what something was but is barely anymore. The film spills and shafts of light emanate from silenced projectors, reminding us of what our world once was. Like the lost art of medieval stained glass, the cinema lives on in the imagination and in its magical apparatus. The cinema’s ‘dream factory’ is closing and reopening as something else.” -John Hanhardt, “The End(s) of Film”
Gibson + Recoder have exhibited their expanded cinema installations and projection performances since 2000. Their works are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf. Artist awards and commissions include the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Italy, National Endowment for the Art’s U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship, and Mad. Sq. Art in New York. Gibson + Recoder live and work in New York. gibsonrecoder.com
