Sara Magenheimer: Slow Zoom Long Pause

JOAN presents Slow Zoom Long Pause, a video by Sara Magenheimer.

In Slow Zoom Long Pause, 2015, her most recent video, Magenheimer asks; What would it mean for form to have rhythm? It’s a question of physicality; an idea chafing against its embodiment.  This work hovers in that space of friction between concept and material limitation; considering a human vessel – the “content” being somewhat begrudgingly resigned to it’s physical form. Color, too, possess a certain rhythm as wavelengths of the visible spectrum, but in this work the voice is central. The script traverses various modes of speech; hyperbolic, melodramatic, inquisitive, authoritative, sentimental – as it questions the rhythm of objects, the body as an object, the meaning of imaginary and “real” things, and what we can see versus only hear or feel. By the end it’s clear that the narrator’s voice is actually an embodied multiplicity of voices. She’s even doing a Q and A with herself.

Concurrent with this exhibition Slow Zoom Long Pause will also premiere theatrically at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center.

*(In the following section please speak both Q and A lines. Please say “Q” and “A” as well – not “Question” or “Answer.”)

I have a few questions:
Q: Why is the pool so cold?
A: Because of the sun.
Q: What are you up to in your spare time right now?
A: Getting late.
Q: Getting laid?
A: Yes, I am.
Q: What is your favorite letter of the alphabet?
A: U but upside-down. I also like O because it’s the same coming and going. I was out late last night.
Q: What did you do?
A: I went to a club called “Wiggle Room”
Q: I don’t like going out to clubs.
A: Why not?
Q: I always feel so alone.
A: Oh, maybe you’re going for the wrong reasons?
Q: Why do you go anywhere?
A: When I need a loan I go to the bank.
Q: Tell me about how you eat when you’re alone?
A: I bought $15 worth of fruit and ate it all within 5 minutes.

(Script excerpt from the video, Slow Zoom Long Pause.)

Sara Magenheimer is an artist based in New York.  Recent exhibitions and screenings include China Art Objects, Los Angeles; Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran, Montreal; The Luminary, St. Louis; Interstate Projects, 247365 Gallery, Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn; Chapter, NY; Document, Chicago; and Futura, Prague, Czech Republic, The Ann Arbor Film Festival, MI; Images Festival, Toronto; The New York Film Festival, The Kitchen, Brooklyn Academy of Music; MOMA, Portland, OR; and The Living Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland. She has performed at Recess, MOMA P.S.1, Issue Project Room, Canada Gallery, the Performa 13 Biennial, and most recently at C.off in Stockholm, Sweden. She has received commissions from Triple Canopy and EMPAC at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She was the recipient of a 2014 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant, 2015 Artadia Grant, and winner of the Prix De Varti at the 2015 Ann Arbor Film Festival.

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All images, installation views of Sara Magenheimer, “Slow Zoom Long Pause,” JOAN, Los Angeles, Photos by Joshua White.