Roger Beebe: Films for One to Eight Projectors
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art
- Work Stills:
About This Screening
“This world is dominated by images in both the literal and figurative sense. All my work is an intervention in that desire to understand that world and to think about its relationship to capital, and to work against it from a critical place.” –Roger Beebe, in conversation with Jordan Cronk for the Brooklyn Rail, 2017.
Roger Beebe returns to the road with a program of 16mm multi-projector performances celebrating the 25th anniversary of his first touring program. This evening of expanded cinema will include multiple-projector performances and essayistic videos that “explore the world of found images and the “found” landscapes of late capitalism.” With a fleet of 16mm, Super8, and video projectors, Beebe’s work touches on the themes of labor, structures and structuralism, and the real and virtual, not only in the content of the images, but also in how they appear on screen. This will be his first show in Portland since 2015.
Beebe has screened his films around the globe at such unlikely venues as the CBS Jumbotron in Times Square and McMurdo Station in Antarctica as well as more likely ones including the Sundance Film Festival and the Museum of Modern Art with solo shows at Anthology Film Archives, The Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City, and Los Angeles Filmforum among many other venues. Beebe is also a film programmer: he ran Flicker, a festival of small-gauge film in Chapel Hill, NC, from 1997-2000 and was the founder and Artistic Director of FLEX, the Florida Experimental Film Festival from 2004-2014. He is currently a Professor in the Departments of Art and Theatre, Film, and Media Arts at the Ohio State University.