Geoffrey Alan Rhodes: Statement
The work I've made in the Western New York region (if you include Toronto) over the past seven years has consistently inspected the line between cinema and the gallery in a number of ways. This comes from things in me—pulled in both directions by my own desires for expression and recognition and by the collision of arriving from a Seattle-based independent film community into an avant-garde video community in Buffalo in 2003. In feature film work, gallery installations, and festival shorts I've made work that inspects the line between the cinematic and the actual, the photo and the moving image, the narrative and the durational, the performative and the structural. This hasn't really changed, but the folds have gotten deeper. I have just completed my second feature film that plays with the fictional as real, I am developing a multi-channel video installation that will dissect the structural basis of cinema into screens, and am currently working with a new-technology device that makes film into a deck of cards using Augmented Reality. Describing my work, I run the danger of coming off as a formalist, interested more in the self-reflexive structures of media than in them as materials of expression. But this is an impression that comes from hearing about my work, not from seeing it. I find in these collisions of ideas an expressive dialectic— a way to deconstruct a medium to find myself in it. In its most direct form this can be seen in my long series of auto-performances where through a trick of the production and editing a fantasmic cinema-situation is created that acts as the stage for one long take performance/ gesture. For me, that's what it is all about, trying to invent enough in the situation of production to make that media circuit fresh and active— to electrify something in the wires, feel the lens and screen again, and see.
Geoffrey Alan Rhodes is a filmmaker and installation artist working in upstate New York. His work seeks to open up new ground for cinema, challenging barriers between the real and the imaginary, documentary and narrative, the actual and the fictional. His current art gallery work plays with the boundaries between photo, film, and installation, and has been exhibited recently at the International Society for Electronic Arts, the European Media Arts Festival, Media Art Friesland, the Moscow International Film Festival, and the Chelsea Museum of Art in New York among others. He has received multiple grants from the Princess Grace Foundation, New York Council for the Humanities, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fulbright Foundation, and others.