TEXT You Are Now possesses a highly developed sense of form and an internal logic that values play as much as it does structure... this lively video abounds with a wonderfully crazy energy. Eight weeks into Greater New York Cinema, P.S.1's 20-week sidebar highlighting the past five years in film and video, comes a reprise of Brooklyn-based Jessie Stead's 2006 "structuralist road movie," Foggy Mountains Breakdown More than Non-Foggy Mountains... Deep into the 59-minute film scrolls the definition of "breakdown"; to lose it, or musically, to really go for it, as when one instrumentalist breaks away from others to solo. Taking the film as a band made up of instruments used in filmmaking - sound, image, text and speech to name a few - each breaks down in both ways, at times soaring above the others, at other times deteriorating into poetic confusion, only to be reintegrated into the master structure and born anew. Artist and provocateur Jessie Stead has intrigued my interest since we first met (a little over one year ago) and continues to maintain a near-mythical presence. Her films, videos, and projects possess a quality that seems to be increasingly rare, with a perpetual movement through art and life. It is unmistakable how the artist inhabits her work, and vice versa. From her episodic film Today! to renegade “drive-in” screenings she organizes sporadically at a parking lot in Red Hook, Jessie Stead is both limitless and unparalleled. Time Out New York Can't get e-NYUFF! 2008 NY Underground Film Fest in its last incarnation by T.J. Carlin In last night's program, "Inside, Outside, Upside Down," Jessie Stead's Huge Flag took the cake; the short is a ravishingly beautiful 12-minute-long clip of a parachute-size American flag serving as landscape, ship and surreal billowing tent to a group of gleeful and occasionally overwhelmed picnickers. |
