Tacita Dean: Film

The 11 minute long, silent 35 mm film installation takes Tacita Dean’s beloved medium as both its material and subject. Projected onto a vertical screen, FILM, which makes its U.S. debut at Marciano Art Foundation, takes the form of a monumental strip of film gloriously emerging from the floor of the gallery, and as the work unfolds, the viewer experiences complex cinematic compositions that intercut a variety of images such as a waterfall, a street clock, a pine tree, a smokestack, a flickering bulb, a mountain, and an enormous ostrich egg.

As a hallucinatory cinematic apparition, FILM brings together the handmade and the visionary with the playful and the profound, freely collaging in-camera passages of breathtaking beauty and surrealist dissonance with numerous moments of surprise, humor, and absurdity.

“My relationship to film begins at that moment of shooting and ends in the moment of projection. Along the way, there are several stages of magical transformation that imbue the work with varying layers of intensity. This is why the film image is different from the digital image: it is not only emulsion versus pixels, or light versus electronics, but something deeper—something to do with poetry.”

—Tacita Dean

Marciano Art Foundation
4357 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles
CA 90010

Represented by Marian Goodman Gallery. Images courtesy of MGG and the artist.