Abigail Child

(with Henry Hills)

(9 x 9 inches)

(with Henry Hills)

(1986, 8 x 10 inches)

(1987; 8 x 11 inches)

PROPOSAL FOR URBAN MASS TRANSIT STATIONS: w/ NEW MODERN TIMES (4x8’)

PROPOSAL FOR URBAN MASS TRANSIT STATIONS: w/ THE MAGICIAN. (4x8’)

(2012, 14 x 12.5 inches)

(2008, 9.5 x 19.5 inches)

(2012, 9.5 x 15 inches)

(2010; 4 screen installation for Rome Academy)

In the last decade, Child has expanded her vertical montage to multi-screen installation, exhibiting at The Walker Art Museum and Harvard University, among others. With her piece for the Cryptoporticus, L’impero Invertito, we find her most site-specific installation so far. Here, Child responds to the darker side of Rome, the side that emanates power and military force, as well as to the Cryptoporticus itself, where corridors with arches at end mime streets through which armies, heraldic or attacking, historically enter Rome. The result is a multi-projector video that establishes women and children (usually victims of war) as Emperors and Triumphators, contrasting with scenes from both ancient and contemporary expansionist exploits.

In responding to the rare individuality seen in female portraits in Roman statuary and intrigued as well by the body’s adjustments to the camera, to the “empire of the camera,” the poses that the body performs for the camera— a long-time focus in her film-making— Child has created a series of portraits that limn history even as they invert it.

Hacking Empire is a single screen version of the piece.

(2007, Pingyao China for Dziga Vertov Project)

Created for Perry Bard’s The Man With the Movie Camera: The Global Remake (https://www.perrybard.net/man-with-a-movie-camera). For Scene 28, Child had just returned from China in 2006 and instantly thought of the Cigarette Girl in MWAMC who is sped up by Vertov as she works in the factory line. Child took that section as inspiration and edited the noodle-maker from Pinyao, China who was artfully spinning his Mongolian-style noodles into meals for the customers.

For Background: In 2006, Bard proposed The Man With the Movie Camera: The Global Remake as a much-expanded exercise in remaking Vertov’s film. Simply put, the idea was to design a website on which contributors could upload individual shots corresponding to those in Vertov’s original work. The site would also provide an opportunity to screen the remake in tandem with the original. The idea was funded as a project for the BBC’s Bigger Screen Initiative, whose aim is to place large digital screens in British town squares. [Review from: https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc52.2010/FeldmanVertov/text.html]

(2006)

“Child simultaneously projects three films on different walls, all soundtracks running. To the left and right are black-and-white montages of Hollywood’s bygone genres, and ahead (at center stage) is her newest film, a full-color riff on Bollywood. Here, Child’s fragmentation techniques break into the human realm, and we emerge transformed….. Child’s cutting techniques reconfigure sensory/cinematic perception altogether.” — Karen Schiff in Big Red & Shiny. BIG RED AND SHINY, Issue 42. 5/06

(2006, 3-screen installation)

BY DESIRE is an experimental digital video exploring issues of bisexual, transgender & down-low identities. The work is sexy, groundbreaking & long overdue.

(2003, installation version of 16mm film DARK DARK)

My 2001 film DARK DARK is rear-projected on a handmade circular screen. The result is a magical rendering of the body, city streets and motion. The original DARK DARK is full of found inversions, but here projected through the round screen, it forms an apt analogy to the human eye where light is inverted before the mind re-reads it.

CAKE + STEAK (framed) at Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis; Philosophy Box, NYC; Austrian Film Museum, et al.

CAKE + STEAK (2004) is composed of home movies from post war New Jersey. At one point we encounter a living room with a portrait of the ‘woman of the house’ in a large frame on the wall. It made me think to ‘frame’ the film entirely as an installation. This was mounted in a gold ornate frame and made explicit years later in the virtual projection of BLONDE FUR [a section from CAKE + STEAK] which was outfitted as mounted in a virtual living room with oriental rug and sofa, the film ‘framed’ above on the wall, playing in ‘real’ time. A thoroughly intermix of times and spaces.