Jeanne Liotta

Jeanne Liotta makes films, videos, and other ephemera including installed projections, works on paper, and photographic works. Her works encompass a constellation of mediums and interests often located at a lively intersection of art, science, and natural philosophy. OBSERVANDO EL CIELO (2007), her signature 16mm film of the night skies, was voted one of the top films of the decade by The Film Society of Lincoln Center, took the Tiger Award for Short Film at Rotterdam International Film Festival, and was listed in Artforum Top Ten Films of 2007. In 2011 Liotta was voted among the top filmmakers of the decade by Film Comment magazine, and in she 2012 received the Helen Hill award from the Orphans Film Symposium. In 2013 Anthology Film Archives held a retrospective of her work called THE REAL WORLD AT LAST BECOMES A MYTH, and she installed STEIN TIMES (2013) an altered Gertrude Stein poem in the windows of Gridspace Gallery, Bklyn. She also works with Microscope Gallery in Bushwick, Bklyn. In 2014 she collaborated on an art/science project with the NOAA, creating SOON (2014), a media work about climate change for a 360 degree screening platform which premiered at The Fiske Planetarium in Boulder CO. Her works are exhibited internationally, including The New York and Rotterdam Film Festivals, The 2006 Whitney Biennial, The 2013 Sharjah Biennial, The Centres George Pompidou, The Cinematheque Francais, The Arthouse/ Jones Center in Austin, The Exploratorium in San Francisco, The Wexner Center for the Art in Ohio, The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and the Cornell Astronomical Society amongst other venues. For 17 years she was the creative force behind Firefly Cinema, a community garden microcinema curated from the 16mm collection at The New York Public Library, and she also maintains ongoing research and lectures on The Joseph Cornell Film Collection at Anthology Film Archives in New York. She has taught widely and variously over the years, and is presently Associate Professor in Film Studies at The University of Colorado Boulder, as well as Film/Video faculty for the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She divides her time between Manhattan and the mountains of Colorado. http://www.jeanneliotta.net/

Project Statement: In "Diagram Squared" by Jeanne Liotta, two mediums combine to create a single work: two 16mm scientific animations from the 1970s ("Time Dilation" and "Relativity of Simultaneity"), are projected onto two original digital prints from the artist’s Spontaneous Geometry series, thus expanding the viewing of both the films and the static prints.

"Diagram Squared" provides a spatial and temporal experience to consider diagrams and how they are used concretely to help us to visualize concepts that are abstract, invisible or seemingly unknowable. But it is also a humorous piece, as we come to realize that although we see measurements and geometric forms interacting with each other for the sake of a clear description, we still don’t really understand how time in fact works.

Artists and scientists have always used techniques of observation, illustration, and imagination in attempting to describe the experience and phenomena of reality. Liotta often works with scientific imagery in her artistic process creating a cognitive and playful space for thinking about our physical world.

Diagram Squared
Archival inkjet prints, 16mm film transferred to digital video loop
2013

Jeanne will also be performing TEA in collaboration with sound artist Laetitia Sonami at the exhibition opening on February 18th.

Project Statement: TEA is an intimate performance based on a Japanese tea ceremony with projection, shadows, smoke, and tea. Performed by Jeanne Liotta with live sound by Oakland artist Laetitia Sonami.

The tea smoke
and the willow
together trembling
-ISSA