FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

{CTS} creative thriftshop in conjunction with Dam, Stuhltrager Gallery is deeply honored to present Amy Greenfield’s solo exhibition Untitled Nude curated by Lynn del Sol and set to open the winter season of 2010 (Opens Jan. 15th 6-10pm). Amy Greenfield, a filmmaker whose name in the circles of art and film is synonymous with pioneer, re-envisions three of her breakthrough films of the past and pushes them to new terrain of the present.

Greenfield, a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship artist and award winning film-maker of over three decades, is known for having pushed erotic inflection on the theory of cine-dance and carving out post-formalism by revolutionizing human energy through the female nude. Her films go beyond examination and analysis, they travel deep to the cosmic core of the body where her visual literacy spills out in raw direction and motivates us to consider and watch ourselves through the reflection of her films' participants. The fabric of her films functions on her belief that the human body and it's physicality is the best metaphor for understanding the layers of the female.

Throughout Greenfield’s films she focuses on the innate dignity of the human body. The themes of identity and meaning emerge in our common movements. Walking, falling, embracing, rolling, running, lifting, sliding are what she and her performers do in her films. For Greenfield the body, moving with, and against, the close up camera, can be the concrete image of inner human nature, an instrument for its expression, and a vessel containing images and actions that crystalize the meaning and mysteries of experience: memory and movement, the past and the present moment.1

The French poet, Paul Valery, noted that "The nude is for the artist what love is for the poet"

Since the turn of the decade and with the advent of such technologic leaps forward in the medium, Greenfield revisited three of her films MUSEic Of The BODy (1994), Tides (1982), and Element (1973), in which we are presenting during her exhibition Untitled Nude. This exhibition as a whole draws from a vast vocabulary the artist has created over the years. These works in particular mark pivotal points in the creative process of an artist who’s work has been not only included in shows at the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Anthology Film Archives and the American Museum of the Moving Image and others of esteemed value but has managed to seize hold and capture a moment in time where there were such extremes and oppositions. “As we worked, many opposing associations “attached” themselves to the action-image. Video meant to some of us freedom. No rules. So we made our own art “laws”. Like the children given free-for-all. Discovery of entering a new art medium. Discovery- entering unknown –in world –in art –in self.”

On the center wall of the gallery stands an old beat up piano with a flashy new flat screen television upon it. The very contrary nature of the two emblematize the Fluxus movement on which our first film plays MUSEic Of The BODy. The film in many ways is not only a tribute to Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik both well known artists and musicians but also a pivotal experience for Greenfield. It was the first time she directed a large scale multi media stage event that would influence her own work for the next decade.

After including parts of Element in installations in Europe, in 1994 Paik asked Greenfield to collaborate with him on a multimedia Fluxus performance, “For Charlotte Moorman”, which was part of what was referred to as the SeOUL/NYmAX, festival at Anthology Film Archives in New York. The two artists composed their original sections entirely apart. In her tribute to Moorman, behind the live action Greenfield projected video of performer Suzanne Gregoire, which she shot beforehand and during the performance. After Nam June passed away, she turned that video into MUSEic Of the BODy, “For Nam June Paik”.

Her subjective camera zooms in and out at a dizzying pace on performer Suzanne Gregoire, who is completely nude in a pair of stilettos and a long string of extra large pearls. She is bound and tangled in the expansive string of pearls while she plays Nam June Paik's interactive piano/video installation Pyramid- Interactive with her convoluted body. She pounds the piano in a desperate physical wail. The audience is given the ultimate impression of internal calamity pulled in a cerebral storm of transgressing emotions. Her image fills the mountain of screens, she hammers and tears at her pearls, her eyes make contact with the audience, her body shakes and quivers. The accompanying soundtrack facilitates and promotes this increasing transgression by mixing the rogue piano notes with the classic sounds of Beethoven's piano sonata. Her head reaches back, the pearls tighten, she exhales, the piano fades, it is understood this dance continues on in an ethereal sphere now.

Across from MUSEic Of The BODy displayed side by side on the gallery’s wall in an otherwise sparse setting Element and Tides, captures the tension between the body and earth. An almost eerie invert of each other although a decade apart in their making this dual presentation brings both women together in almost dream-like occurrence of silence within vocality.

This is depicted in Element through her attempt to move across the trenches of wet mud--trying to run to and away from the weight of the malleable earth. There is a sense of struggle, a sense of urgency, as her body falls, rolls, and sinks into the folds of the silt. An escape as well as a surrender. The viewer is drawn in, not only because the camera is set only a few feet from the artist-- the camera man Hilary Harris knee deep in the mud--but there is this immediacy, this understanding of sensuality and the need to touch our beginnings to be accepted by our spirituality. As the artist brings herself to her physical limits there is a moment when you know the disorientation is a veil of fulfillment.

In many ways Tides is an organismic cleansing where Element is a relentless battle. It is a flirtation of interaction between the rejuvenation of a crisp white wave cresting and enveloping the body. Pushing and whipping one into submission. Integrating the body with its every move, with its vastness. There seems to be an acceptance by the artist that time and movement have their own rhyme here and that all things “peculiar to it’s nature is eternal to its nature”2

It's a curious thing to envision how a filmmaker may revisit the editing process after a decade of having already perceived it's completion. In this case, Amy maintains her pioneering technique of stringing the human body and camera together by taking advantage of the modern day high-definition video format to further engross the viewer in the rawness of her appeal. The three films, playing in the same sparse room, reveal continuity of the vast autonomy of their parts and the experimental aesthetics that articulate Amy's common blend of the extreme physicality of emotional tug-of-war. Her films are an exercise in the body being pulled here and there and ultimately, seducing us.

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1 from Flesh into Light: The Cinema of Amy Greenfield. by Robert Haller.
2 from Dance of the Future. by Isadora Duncan. 1903