ANTI-COSMOS
Dir. Takashi Makino | 2022 | 16 mins
One of the few artists still earnestly committed to an ideal of grand spectacle, Takashi Makino crafts all-over abstractions that are uniquely overwhelming. Here, color provides the shape, tracing an arc through oscillating fields of mottled not-objective imagery as they modulate steadily from cool blues, purples, and greens into hotter and drier reds, pinks, oranges, and browns, and then back to the initial shades. The score, a deep and unnerving arrangement of processed field recordings by Lasse Marhaug and the great Lawrence English, seems to confirm that the sense of climate catastrophe which emerges isn’t incidental. - Phil Coldiron
NIGHT WALK
Dir. Sohn Koo-yong | 2023 | 65 mins
There is an incredible depth to Sohn Koo-young’s images—levels of both contrast and detail that would seem antithetical. They are so close to stills, if it weren’t for the movement. Night Walk’s compositions evoke a point-and-click PC game; the shots are locked off precisely and the details beckon to you. The fragments of text and poetry that provide narration, similarly, feel like an interactive text game—the tender grass aids my (your?) footsteps, the firefly lights my (your?) path. The night is dyed in a shade of indigo that I want to discover for myself, like Rohmer’s Green Ray. A bottling of a simple, yet perhaps impossible, experience. - Mackenzie Lukenbill