Martha Colburn Secret Cinema
For this second session, we are pleased to be presenting the unique work of Martha Colburn, an American artist who was born in 1971 in Gettysburg, in Pennsylvania, and is currently residing in Europe.
Since 1994, Martha Colburn has been developing an unusual oeuvre through an abundant array of techniques and inventiveness.
Associated with the art of animation and experimental film, she embarked upon her collage and filmic assemblage activities by candidly and sarcastically cutting out the boring parts of film reels which she found when she was living in Baltimore, the city “where no one lives forever” (as Tommy Carcetti put it in The Wire), and which is still the mythical set of John Waters’s films today. So her work is the product of a form of social economy (which constructed her post-Vietnam war way of looking at things) and a visual cross-fertilization (at the crossroads of the Wizard of Oz, Stan Van Der Beek’s experiments, and the uninterrupted flow of television).
As cinema of reaction, her oeuvre examines the geopolitical forms of real and media-conveyed violence, and their intrusion into the household space. This research, a sort of caustic archaeology of the visual, is developed within a praxis of the image based on the assemblage, dismemberment and hierarchization of images. One of her films was selected for the 2006 Cannes Festival. She works with musicians such as Deerhoof and Felix Kubin. The screening of one of her latest productions, Metamorfoza, shown
for the first time in Paris in our Secret Cinema, was accompanied by the
Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra.
