Bridges and Passages
During his 22 years teaching at the Art Institute of Chicago, the legendary experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage helped many filmmakers find their own voice. The best of them would produce work that would thankfully avoid being too closely linked to his inescapable influence on the American avant-garde, including such important filmmakers as Bill Brand, Louis Hock, Marjorie Keller, and Saul Levine. One of the lesser-known names to emerge from the Chicago scene was Bruce Wood, a Massachusetts-based painter whose love of Brakhage's classic Window Water Baby Moving and the animated films of Robert Breer had him specifically coming to the Institute to study under Brakhage. After a five-year period of prolific filmmaking in the 1970s that led to greater recognition in Europe than in the United States, he largely returned to painting and subsequent work as an art dealer. Wood's almost entirely black-and-white body of cinematic work both predates the B&W works of the better-known Andrew Noren, and suggests an alternative route for monochromatic abstraction that is closer to Franz Kline's paintings and a private form of calligraphy than conventional photography. His use of multiple exposures and superimpositions, rescaling images, and single-frame manipulations turn initially realistic imagery into sensual shadow motions. Spectacle is pleased to announce the first-ever complete retrospective of Bruce Wood's 16mm short films, with all titles projected on 16mm, and with Wood in attendance for introductions and Q&As. Co-programmed with Forrest Sprague. Special thanks to Bruce Wood and The Film-Makers' Cooperative. "EDGE FORCES is an abstract collage of rapid nebulous forms and calligraphic lines. The frame is used as a "canvas" for thousands of fleeting images that try to expand beyond its confines. Viewers are compelled either to comprehend the dynamic flow of the images, or to make free subjective associations with them." – Bruce Wood