Jonas Mekas: Fragments of Paradise
Maya Stendhal Gallery
3 March - 30 April 2005

For Immediate Release-

Maya Stendhal Gallery is proud to present Jonas Mekas: Fragments of Paradise, a multimedia solo exhibition of cinema, film stills, video installation, and rare objects from the artist’s personal collection. Jonas Mekas is a filmmaker, curator, writer, poet, and the founder and artistic director of Anthology Film Archive; his celebratory lifework here becomes a way to read the last fifty years of New York art-making. This exhibition aims to reintegrate the innovations of experimental film into contemporary currents in the visual arts. Fragments of Paradise will be on view from 3 March to 31 April 2005.

Jonas Mekas will premiere two works on video: “Letters from Greenpoint” (78 min., 2004) and “For Maya: Father and Daughter” (4.5 min., 2005), dedicated to curator and director Maya Stendhal. He will also show “Elvis”, (1 min., 2001), which incorporates footage from Elvis Presley’s last concert; “Wien & Mozart” (1 min., 2001), “Happy Birthday to John”, an homage to John Lennon (24 min, 1996); “Cassis” (4 min., 1966), which condenses an idyllic three hour sunset into four minutes of film; “Notes on the Circus” (12 min., 1966); “Travels”, five short travelogues from Italy, Russia, and Sweden (7 min., 1970) and the rarely-seen self-portrait “Lonesome Day” (4 min., 2003), in which Jonas clowns around his studio to the Bruce Springsteen song of the same title. A single monitor installation in homage to Mekas, called NOTHING / MOVING: A Multicellular Organigram, based on Mekas’s film “As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty”, by Nisi Jacobs with Pip Chodorov, will also be on view.

Film stills, which function both as self-contained photographic works and as accompaniments to Mekas’s films, will be on view in the Main Gallery. Mekas calls these images “Frozen Film Frames”, writing, “I am obsessed with the possibilities of having two, three frames/images together, detaching them from the context [of the film], and letting them be by themselves.” A limited edition of three signed and numbered Frozen Film Frames incorporate moving images into a photographic wall installation*.

“Dedication to Fernand Léger”, a video installation, will be on view in the Project Room. “Dedication” is Mekas’s response to a text from 1933, in which Leger dreams of film that would show 24 hours in the life of an ordinary couple. In this installation, twenty-four hours of film from Mekas’s family video diary are spread over twelve monitors, with two hours of footage per monitor, representing a radically different approach to the “reality” genre.

Rare objects from Jonas Mekas’s personal collection will be on display in the Private Viewing Room. Cuttings of film from throughout his life, spliced together to make what Mekas calls a “Rillette” film, named after the delicious spread his mother would make from leftover meat when he was a child, will be shown alongside gifts from friends spanning the length of his half-century career.

Jonas Mekas was born in Semeniskiai, Lithuania, in 1922. He lives and works in New York. After being imprisoned by the Nazis in a forced-labor camp and a period in Belgian Displaced-Person camps, Mekas studied philosophy at the University of Mainz from 1946-48. He then emigrated with his brother to the United States, settling in Williamsburg. Mekas discovered avant-garde film at venues such as Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16, and began to screen his own films in 1953. In 1954 he became Editor-in-Chief of Film Culture magazine, and in 1958 he began his groundbreaking “Movie Journal” column in The Village Voice. In 1962, Mekas founded the Film-Makers’ Cooperative (FMC) and the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque in 1964. The latter eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives, one of the world’s largest repositories of avant-garde film, which Mekas continues to direct. Mekas’s film output includes narrative (“Guns of the Trees”, 1961), documentary (“The Brig”, 1963) and diaries (“Walden”, 1969; “Lost, Lost, Lost”, 1975; “Reminiscences of a Voyage to Lithuania”, 1972; “Zefiro Torna”, 1992; and “As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty”, 2001.) In addition to his prolific output in film, Jonas Mekas has published twenty-four volumes of poetry, essays, interviews, and diaries, and has been the subject of twelve book-length studies. His films have been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world, including The Jeu de Paume in Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Tokyo, The Venice Biennale, and many others.

*LCD Screen Technology Coutesy of Westinghouse
*Installation by B. Lawrence Inc.

An Opening Reception will take place on Thursday, March 3, from 6:00-9:00 pm.

MAYA I STENDHAL I GALLERY 545 West 20th St. New York 10011 212.366.1549 www.mayastendhalgallery.com