Mark Street
2021
Sliding Off the Edge of the World
Mark Street
A stab at depicting fatherhood: fleeting images burst onto the screen only to recede from view just as quickly, suggesting transition and decay. Tendrilsof images cluster together and then dissipate. A snowy walk, kids enthuse and infuse my own daily rhythms, affording great joy but also making it clear that all things change all the time.
Sliding Off the Edge of the World
Alone, Apart: The Dream Reveals the Waking Day
Mark Street
An homage to two ramshackle cities, made up of footage shot while wandering. I meander city streets with a camera, looking to be haunted by unfamiliar vistas. I find solace in the forgotten landscapes, odd voices on a ham radio, shimmering water in a desolate harbor. Later I attack the film, moving it this way and that, trying to squeeze it against its will, wrest strangeness from the everyday.
Alone, Apart: The Dream Reveals the Waking Day
Vera Drake, Drowning
Mark Street
"I buried a 35 mm trailer for the Mike Leigh film in my garden and came upon it several years later. The vagaries of nature (snow, rain, ice, sun) yielded a scrupulous document of the passing of time. Soundtrack made up of ambient musique concrete and snippets of music sung by women."
Vera Drake, Drowning
Winterwheat
Mark Street
WINTERWHEAT was made by bleaching, scratching and painting directly on the emulsion of an educational film about the farming cycle. I wanted to manipulate the found footage to create lulling, hypnotic visuals while also suggesting an apocalyptic narrative. Though the images can be viewed purely for their graphic idiosyncrasy, a quiet but persistent theme of destruction winds its way through the film.
Winterwheat
Collision of Parts
Mark Street
A kaleidoscopic reverie recorded over a period of five years in various urban milieus. An excavation of the concept of montage: small moments public and private brush up against each other, creating a charged tapestry of the immediate. Inside and outside, motion and stasis, home and travel, light and dark: a series of contrasts do battle.
Collision of Parts
Guiding Fictions
Mark Street
Images shot on walks in the forest with an old, twisted 35mm camera. The film trudged through the camera, on a last mission. I buried the film in the front yard. Let the dirt on the film kiss the dirt in the ground. Maryland humidity wore it down to its wisps. Much later, sound recorded in Brooklyn. Teenage skateboarders smoking cigarettes and jumping off the steps at my local subway entrance. A Russian festival in the park, much singing and speechmaking, all incomprehensible to me. The schism between the country and city, so clear at last.
Guiding Fictions
Sweep
Mark Street
A day like any other: Brooklyn beckons so they dart out into it. Daughter and father traipse from playground to subway and back home again. The 18-month-old cackles and the 32-year-old tries his best to keep up. They stumble upon a fruit vendor, a street preacher and a wall of city sound. Negative and positive hand-manipulated images collide and shimmer as they walk and talk their way through spring in the city. Maya babbles but her father is mostly silent: he can’t believe that he’ll never meander quite this way again.
Sweep
Blue Movie
Mark Street
A smattering of repeated performances culled from old porno films and hand painted. A man bends over a body, but what we really notice is the texture of the wall behind him. A woman stares back at the viewer with annoyance. On the soundtrack Anais Nin declares: “but while I’m doing this I feel I’m not living.”
Blue Movie
XY Chromosome Project
Lynne Sachs, Mark Street
The X Y Chromosome Project is the creation of artists Lynne Sachs and Mark Street. In addition to our two daughters, we make films and performances that use the split screen to cleave the primordial and the mediated. After returning from an inspiring week long artist retreat at the Experimental Television Center, Lynne asked Mark to collaborate with her on the creation of a piece in which they would each ruminate on the other's visual, reacting in a visceral way to what the other had hurled on the screen. Lynne would edit; Mark would edit. Back and forth and always forward. No regrets or over-thinking. In this way, the diptych structure is sometime's a boxing match and other times a pas de deux. Newsreel footage of Ronald Reagan's assassination attempt is brushed up against hand painted film, domestic spaces, and Christmas movie trailers. Together, we move from surface to depth and back again without even feeling the bends.
XY Chromosome Project
