Vanderbilt’s Department of Art opens StudioVU: Lecture Series 2013-2014 with Carving a Ball of Sound with an Image Chisel, a discussion and film screening by experimental filmmaker Leighton Pierce, on Wednesday, October 23, at 7 pm in room 103 of Wilson Hall on the Vanderbilt campus. In addition to his lecture, Pierce will air his newly completed film, White Ash (30 minutes, 2013).
The film’s statement describes the work as “an inexorable dive into edges of consciousness. While grounded in recognizable images and sounds captured from reality, White Ash is designed to scrape through the patina of normal perception, leading to an embodied associational state—-something ‘to the side’ of narratives and perceptions. Pierce meticulously weaves the warp and weft of image and sound leading the viewer into a conscious meditative state. Shooting and then animating thousands of moving camera, hand-held, long exposure, digital still photographs into articulations of real spaces and events, Pierce re-articulates and recontextualizes the video by applying the lever of a judiciously and intentionally composed musique-concrète soundtrack.”
Pierce is acclaimed for his experimentation with film, video, and sound, creating experiences in transformative time. He has created multi-channel site-specific installations as well as single channel works that have been exhibited in major art museums and film festivals throughout the world, including The Whitney Bienniale, and the Sundance, San Francisco, New York, Tribeca, Ann Arbor, and Rotterdam Film Festivals, the Exploratorium in San Francisco, Montreal Museé d’art contemporaine, and The Sheldon Art Museum. Retrospectives of his works have been presented at such venues as The New Zealand Film Festival, Lincoln Center, The Cinémathèque française, Festival Nemo, and Pompidou Center in Paris, and at The Lisbon Biennale.
Pierce is currently acting dean of the School of Art and Design at Pratt Institute, the director/producer at Leighton Pierce Image and Sound, and professor emeritus of film, video, and audio production at the University of Iowa. The recipient of fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and Creative Capital Foundation, he received his MFA from Syracuse University.
Free and open to the public, this event is co-sponsored by the Vanderbilt University Film Studies Program. Free parking is available in the lots on the east side of Wilson Hall as well as across 21st Avenue by Terrace Place. For more information on this lecture or the StudioVU Lecture Series, call the Department of Art at 615-343-7241.
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