Scott Stark
2021The Realist
Scott Stark
Scott Stark leads us through a dizzying array of consumerist goods in his stereoscopic mannequin melodrama The Realist. Composed of flickering still images, this entrancing romp conjures retail worlds both familiar and strange, in which chiselled mannequins may in fact be communing with each other amid the overwhelming array of apparel. Whether viewed as consumerist critique or spellbinding, operatic fantasy, The Realist employs a deft binary structure that skews toward the metaphysical.
The Realist
Chromesthetic Response
Scott Stark
A collage of human-created worldly surfaces - sidewalks, streets, storefronts - that evoke subtle and mysterious noises. "Chromesthesia" is a condition whereby one sees a color or shape and experiences a sensation of taste, smell or hearing.
Chromesthetic Response
Acceleration
Scott Stark
A snapshot taken in a moment of human evolution, where the souls of the living are reflected in the windows of passing trains. The camera captures the reflections of passengers in the train windows as the trains enter and leave the station, and the movement creates a stroboscopic flickering effect that magically exploits the pure sensuality of the moving image.
Acceleration
NOEMA
Scott Stark
NOEMA is philosopher Husserl's term for "the meaning of an object that is formed in the domain of consciousness." Pornographic videos are mined for the unerotic moments between moments, when the actors are engaging in an awkward change of position or when the camera pans meaningfully away from the urgent mechanisms of sex up to a cheap painting on the wall or the distant embers of a crackling fire. A piercing musical score loops endlessly throughout, and the repetitive and curious iterations of movement become furtive searches for meaning within their own blandness.
NOEMA
Degrees of Limitation
Scott Stark
A silent film made completely in about 15 minutes on a partly cloudy day in San Francisco in 1982. With the 16mm Bolex camera mounted on a tripod, I wound the motor a single crank and ran as far as I could before the camera stopped (about 1 second). I returned and wound it 2 cranks and did the same, then repeated the process adding one crank each time. With these self-imposed limitations, would I make it to the top of the hill before the film ran out?
Degrees of Limitation
Satrapy
Scott Stark
Rephotographed pornographic playing cards rhythmically intrude upon a piercing 5-beat score of different-sized black parallel lines, creating an almost indiscernible complexity, until the lined background ruptures and the sounds and visuals become scattered and disordered. The "girlie" cards break out onto saturated color fields and eventually find their way into the real world, aggressively flickering by against backgrounds of earth, concrete and other surfaces.
Satrapy
More Than Meets the Eye: Remaking Jane Fonda
Scott Stark
Scott Stark
More Than Meets The Eye: Remaking Jane Fonda is a remake of one of Jane Fonda's exercise videos, with Scott Stark as the performer, set in a variety of locations, both public and private. The filmmaker underscores a sense of the supposed embarrassment a male might feel by inhabiting what is essentially a feminine landscape. By overlaying the diligent exercise imagery with provocative and pointed quotations from Jane Fonda's activist days, as well as her thoughtful ruminations from her recent autobiography on war, political transformation, female anxiety, and the "need to be perfect," this remake gives voice to the artist's feelings about the criminality of contemporary war-making and our complicity in a world that gives rise to a kind of cultural bulimia. In the process, the video becomes an indirect chronicle of the remaking of a celebrity activist and the cultural shifts that allowed it to happen.
More Than Meets the Eye: Remaking Jane Fonda
in.side.out
Scott Stark
in.side.out is a very personal piece. On the surface it's about the changes taking place, over a two-year period, in an empty lot and a decrepit old building next to my house. Deeper down it's about the walls and windows between my interior and exterior selves, and how the fragile constructs of identity are etched, eroded, re-shaped and transformed by outside forces.
in.side.out
Back in the Saddle Again
Scott Stark
A found footage film that innocently plays with many of the elements I explore in my own work. A family's playful interaction with a 16mm sound movie camera, singing along as a group with Gene Autrey's title song in front of the camera, combines western fantasy, American kitsch, gender posturing, deterioration of the film's surface, the wonderment of the cinematic process, and the use of controlled accidents to shape the form of the film. My only intrusion on the footage was to print it first in negative, which adds a mysterious, ghostly edge to it, and to print it again in positive, which seems to answer many of the questions raised in the first version.
Back in the Saddle Again
Right
Scott Stark
A playful study of one of the U.S.A.'s most ubiquitous symbols, and an attempt to re-invent it as a thing of problematic beauty. Overlayed on top of the imagery are snippets of an email exchange I had with a person who was and remains a staunch apologist for the Bush administration's hundreds of lies leading up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, as well as for the administration's many other crimes, corruptions and failings.
Right