GRAFFITI REPORT FORM
Dir. Frank Heath, 2012.
52 min. USA.
INVASIVE SPECIES
Dir. Frank Heath, 2012.
11 min. USA.
ASYMPTOMATIC CARRIER
Dir. Frank Heath, 2013.
10 min. USA.
WEDNESDAY, MAY 29 – 8:00 PM
“& Other Works” is a series of screenings focusing on video and film from contemporary artists, organized by C. Spencer Yeh. “& Other Works” seeks out artists’ efforts which invite and evoke the cinematic experience, yet are typically looped on crowded walls or locked up in online isolation. “& Other Works” screens beginning to end, in an informal but focused communal viewing experience. In other words – “film, folks, fun.” The inaugural program features artist Frank Heath, who will be in attendance.
Invasive Species begins as a document of a peculiar request by phone, set against a beautiful day at Green-Wood Cemetery. The exchange meanders into multiple tangents, from parakeets to numerology, while the onscreen events turn bizarrely synchronous. Asymptomatic Carrier, created for this year’s Frieze Arts Fair NYC, flies over the abandoned North Brother Island in the East River. Wikipedia says “now a bird sanctuary, the island is currently abandoned and off-limits to the public… …from the 1980s through the early 2000s it supported one of the area’s largest nesting colonies of Black-crowned Night Heron. However as of 2011 this species has abandoned the island for unknown reasons.”
Graffiti Report Form is described a press release excerpt:
“Heath’s formally complex video Graffiti Report Form, which as the title suggests, was actually submitted to the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. What begins as a first person account of a concerned citizen wishing to report an instance of graffiti in Morningside Park becomes a film within a film and a subtle meditation on history, place, and narrative structure. Shot over a period of five years, this expanse of time is both compressed and extended through a confluence of interventionist gesture, historical anecdote, and fictional narrative. Dystopian survival story in the guise of an urgent militaristic transmission, the film elicits issues of public and private space, the arbitrary nature of anniversary, and the peculiar history of this specific park as the starting place for the infamous 1968 student revolt at nearby Columbia University.”
Frank Heath, born in St. Joseph, MO in 1982, lives and works in New York. Last spring, he made his first solo exhibition in New York at Simone Subal Gallery. Two-person shows include Bcc:, with Brendan Meara at Roots and Culture, Chicago (2011), and Econoline 1, with JJ PEET at Videotage Gallery, Hong Kong (2007). Past group shows and screenings include Matter Out of Place at The Kitchen (2012), Someone Has Stolen Our Tent at Simon Preston Gallery, New York (2012), Single Channel at Soho House, Miami FL (2011); Forcemeat at Wallspace, New York (2011); and Suddenly: Where We Live Now at Cooley Gallery, Reed College, Portland, OR; and Pomona College Museum of Art (2008, 2009).