Distinguished Professor Emeritus and legendary avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs will perform and screen recent films for two nights in Mississauga and Toronto.

All screenings and performances are FREE and open to the public.

No reservations necessary.

For more information visit www.blackwoodgallery.ca or call 905.828.3789.

NERVOUS MAGIC LANTERN

Friday November 18
8 – 10pm
Instructional Centre, Room 245, University of Toronto Mississauga

*A FREE shuttle bus departs OCADU (100 McCaul St. Toronto) at 6:30pm, and returns for 10:30pm.
Click here for campus maps and directions. (Park in lot #9)

Ken Jacobs' legendary Nervous Magic Lantern is a performance of live cinema without film. The performance consists of a projector, crafted by Jacobs himself, that produces three-dimensional abstractions without the use of celluloid. Based on the magic lantern of the 19th century, the projector is manually operated and relies on the play of light, objects and transparencies to produce large scale abstractions in motion.

A Q & A period will follow the performance.

SEEKING THE MONKEY KING

Saturday November 19
7 – 9pm
University College, Room 140, St. George Campus
Click here for campus maps

*This screening will be followed by a reception at the University of Toronto Art Centre lounge from 9 – 11pm. All are welcome!

This is the Canadian premiere of the recently completed and already widely celebrated film, Seeking the Monkey King.

"Set to the music of J. G. Thirlwell, this digital video largely consists of valleys and hills of what look like crumpled foil that Mr. Jacobs, through his manipulations, has turned into landscapes that shift, undulate and seem to pop off the screen as if in 3D. Often tinted golden yellow and blue (colors used in the silent era usually to denote day and night), the images sometimes freeze and are amended by on-screen history lessons, political commentary, moments of sentiment and words of advice: Read Marx. See René Clair's 'Nous la Liberté.' To which I will add: See this movie." - Manohla Dargis, New York Times.

"Be prepared for a cinema experience that takes a place between two and three dimensions, pushing time to take on substance and enveloping you into the a world beyond the surreal. This has been an epic undertaking, incomparable with any other avant-garde film you've ever seen." - Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective.

The following short films will also be screened:

Capitalism: Slavery (2006)
The Surging Sea of Humanity (2006)
Capitalism: Child Labor (2006)
Another Occupation (2011)

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Ken Jacobs is a legendary avant-garde filmmaker, whose work has screened across the world in venues such as the Louvre, the Museum of Modern Art, the Cinemathèque Française, and the New York Film Festival. In addition to his widely seen and deeply influential film and video works, Jacobs is a pioneer of projector-based art. His performances of the Nervous Magic Lantern, which are live film-less films push abstraction well past the limits of his painterly predecessors: Hans Hoffman, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, among others.

For more information on the artist, please click here.

Presented as part of U of T Arts Council's 2011 "Speakers in the Arts" series, in partnership with the Department of Visual Studies (UTM), Justina M. Barnicke Gallery and the University of Toronto Art Centre.

Blackwood Gallery
University of Toronto Mississauga
3359 Mississauga Rd. N.
Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6
www.blackwoodgallery.ca
blackwood.gallery@utoronto.ca
905.828.3789

Gallery Hours
Monday to Friday 12 – 5 pm
Wednesday to 9 pm
Saturday & Sunday 12 – 3 pm
(closed on civic holidays)