INTERLOCKING DIMENSIONS MULTI-WEEKEND FILM SERIES AT DEERING ESTATE

Chinampas, The Floating Garden | Colectivo Los Ingrávidos | 2023 | Super 8mm| 5 Minutes |COLOR | SOUND. Credit: Courtesy of the Artists and Lightcone.

A veteran of Deering Estate’s cultural programming as a resident artist since 2022, Barron Sherer founder of Moving Image Alliance was the obvious choice when Liliam Dominguez, the Estate’s cultural arts curator, needed a film curator for their current exhibition “Interlocking Dimensions: Eco-Art” on view through March 24.

Narrow Rivers, Open Seas & Seventeen Sunsets (Silences for A Merchant Mariner)
David Gatten | 2016 | 16mm | 8 minutes | COLOR | SILENT
Image Credit: Courtesy of the Artist and Canyon Cinema Foundation.

“Lili commissioned new art from me and also a couple of film programs to run as part of the exhibition,” said Sherer. “The program I curated offers diverse and challenging artist-crafted films and videos that intertwine the concern for nature and our relation to it, expressed within the possibilities of experimental cinema.”

Sherer’s sound art exhibition piece is entitled “Estate Etudes 2” and that, coupled with his two film programs are just two of the ways “he accommodated my vision with regards to the eco-art exhibition,” Dominguez said. “I really love working with him because not only is he a fantastic experimental film artist but he is very easygoing.”

Dominguez and Sherer met and carefully selected the films showing during the consecutive weekend film series starting on Feb. 24 with “Eco-Adjacency in Experimental Films and Videos” and continuing on March 2 with “16mm Experimental Film Program.”

“I asked Barron to include some of the filmmakers he had worked with whose pieces dealt with eco-art. Knowing him as such a guru and 16mm and experimental film archivist, I knew he would be very inclined to this programming,” said Dominguez.

A Perfect Storm | Karel Doing | 2022 | 35mm |3 Minutes | B&W COLOR | SOUND. Credit: Courtesy of the Artist and Lightcone.

Sherer began his research for these two programs in Summer 2023, researching catalogs of film cooperatives on the West Coast of the U.S. and in France, where groups distribute experimental films on behalf of artists and their estates. “It was easy to find artist films surveying experimental film festivals and blogs. Also, the great thing about film cooperatives is they care for film prints and ensure the artists get proper public performance fees; these distributors are an essential part of the cultural ecosystem,” he said.

Sherer purposely chose the first weekend’s lineup of nine films by a younger group of filmmakers to highlight the diversity of how they create film, combining traditional and more contemporary methods. He’s excited that the original format of most of these works is motion picture film.

“These younger filmmakers are shooting 8 and 16mm and then they’re editing and distributing digitally and that is new for me because it’s the first one I’ve done digitally,” said Sherer. “The aesthetic of these young people is what I want to see and what I want the audience to see, that method of capturing on analog and finishing digitally. It’s cool and looks good.”

He’s also excited that the original format of filming isn’t going away because “it’s such a valid technology and tool. There’s that intimacy in an 8mm camera and as a filmmaker, you still take a lot of care when shooting on film because you haven’t got a lot of it,” said Sherer.

Another commonality in the first set of films is their contemporary nature and that they are non-language dependent, using only soundscapes, location recordings and instrumentation. There is some English in the film “Chinampas, The Floating Garden,” from 2023 by Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, a renowned avant-garde film collective based in Mexico whose work is featured at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York and Sherer says “are at the top of their game.”

Merapi | Malena Szlam | 2021 | 16mm |8 minutes |COLOR | SILEN. Credit: Courtesy of the Artist and Lightcone.

The March 2 program features fewer films but the four featured are rare Avant-garde experimental sound and silent artist films presented in their original 16mm film format.

“Filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Barbara Hammer are each legends in their own right. Stan is considered the godfather of this format, having made between 100 and 150 films using a technique where he would paint on the film,” said Sherer. “The technique used by two of the first program’s filmmakers is very inspired by Stan’s work.”

Hammer, he says, is “old school West Coast from California”, a feminist film director whose career spanned 30 years. “She’s considered a pioneer of the lesbian film genre.”

Both shows will appeal to both film enthusiasts and first-time audiences and anyone interested in spectacle and creativity.

Peripeteia 2 | Abigail Child | 1978 | 16mm | 12 minutes | COLOR | SILENT. Credit: Courtesy of the Artist.

“They posit that our community is a cultural center that will support high-quality moving images and sound artwork. I am grateful to Deering Estate for the opportunity to bring fine art and film enthusiasts together,” said Sherer.

The total time for each program is about an hour, a running time that works for these films because “of their intense aural and visual beauty,” said Sherer. The February program has films as short as two minutes and as long as 15 minutes and the March show’s longest running of the four films is 17 minutes.

WHAT: “Interlocking Dimensions: Eco-Art” film series
WHEN: 3 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 24 “Eco-Adjacency in Experimental Films and Videos,” 3 p.m., Saturday, March 2 “16mm Experimental Film Program”
WHERE: Deering Estate, 16701 SW 72 Ave., Miami
COST: Free with RSVP on Eventbrite 
INFORMATION: Deeringestate.org

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