Henry Hills Stills Project​
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Janisse-Barlow's shared fascination with Hills ruin/rubble into play film SSS placed in the eighties Lower East Side New York, has strong connections to her youth in a similar feeling Detroit of the same vintage.
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FROM HENRY HILLS WEBSITE:
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A polymath steeped in multiple fields of avant-garde creativity and a key figure for the consideration of "composition" as a practice across disciplines, Hills's filmwork is inseparable from his involvement with the (sorry to use the contested term) "language poets" as well as the Downtown NY experimental music and dance scenes. The music of John Zorn, Christian Marclay and Tom Cora wends its way throughout Hills's key films, along with fragments of writing and speech by Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman and Bruce Andrews. Hills shares with these highly distinctive artists a focus on the structures of signification, the poetics of colliding fragments, and above all a Futurist commitment to the intellectual power of clamor and speed, only this time — this is crucial! — harnessed for the political left. Hills's films display a preference for what Peter Kubelka called "strong articulations," extreme differences between edits and even frames which push our capacities for understanding to the limit and then some...Henry Hills is such a form-buster that watching his films inevitably prompts a momentary disquieting thought: what's it like inside this guy's head?
— Michael Sicinski, GreenCine Daily
SSS is composed from footage of movement improvised on the streets of pre-gentrified East Village by Sally Silvers, Pooh Kaye, Harry Shepperd, Lee Katz, Kumiko Kimoto, David Zambrano, Ginger Gillespie, Mark Dendy, and others, painstaking synched to music previously improvised for the project at Noise New York by Tom Cora (cello), Christian Marclay (turntables), and Zeena Parkins (harp). Beauty emerging from rubble. Fantastic 80’s fashions.
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Henry Hills has been making dense, intensely rhythmic experimental films since 1975. A longtime resident of New York's East Village, he has ongoing working relationships with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poets, composer John Zorn, and choreographer Sally Silvers. Since 2005 he has been Visiting Professor at FAMU, the Czech national film academy in Prague, and currently lives in Vienna. He received a 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship & his films, which are included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, are available on DVD from Tzadik (www.tzadik.com). His films, with an eccentric humor, seek abstraction within sharply-focused naturalistic imagery & the ethereal within the mundane, promoting an active attentiveness through a relentlessly concentrated montage.
One of the obstacles Janisse-Barlow was running into with finding an entrée into the Channel Surfing project was a lack of source material beyond pure memory. In a time that predated cellular technology and digital cameras, few people kept a photographic record of the scene. Enter Nancy Drew — pillar of the Windsor underground music scene, fashion icon, and hairstylist whose salon chair was the local test lab for what was cool, and what would be cool. When Janisse-Barlow arrived on the scene as a younger teenager in the 1980s, Drew was already established, the lead vocalist for the long-running Windsor psych rock act, Luxury Christ. In the months leading up to Channel Surfing, Janisse-Barlow sat down with Drew, who shared the photographic archive of Windsor’s early punk and New Wave Scene, through the grunge and indie pop years of the 1990s, she has collected with her husband, Rob Brun.
This archive was the access point into the project — the quieter entry point into a very raucous scene to which both women belonged. It happened over a quiet afternoon at Drew’s dining room table, with vegan snacks carefully set out along with the albums.
Rendered in acrylics, India ink, and Beam paint on canvas and panel, the Channel Surfing paintings range in size from five-feet-eight-inches to smaller twenty-by-twenty-inch portraits and are notable for Janisse-Barlow’s nimble colour pallet, interpretive linework, spare mark making, and emotional response to spatial rendering. A woman named Donna (now unlocatable) plays a guitar before appliances and a laundry tub in a basement practice space. Her sojourn in the band Do or Diatribe was short lived, but the energy of the basement band practice in the image is unmistakable. The blue 1979 Dodge B100 van belonging to the artist’s future husband, musician Andrew Barlow, sits rakishly curbside, during a brief reprieve between gigs, Barlow making an appearance himself in a portrait, caught in mid-conversation with a cat perched on his shoulder — both polaroid images found while Janisse-Barlow was cleaning her basement. A woman peers out from between garishly painted fingernails, macabre and playful, in a candid moment before one of Drew’s hair shows where she would create some of the seminal looks of the time. A chandelier floats above a hair show after-party, the flocking of the wallpaper a verdant, mossy constellation that also tips a nod to the strange forgotten luxury of Detroit — a place both Drew and Janisse-Barlow have drawn creative inspiration from for decades. Luxury Christ, with Nancy Drew front and centre on the mic, performs at Changez by Nite — hallowed ground for Windsor’s live music and dance party scene.
“There is a vibrational quality based on what was happening then, and what is happening now,” Janisse-Barlow says of the paintings. “It was a time when Windsor was magical and fun, but also a time when both women found themselves a scene unlike any other. We were all rebelling against something and in our lesser moments, against each other. A mosh pit of circumstance.”
Channel Surfing arrives at an interesting time for the arts and arts communities. The loss of loft spaces, studio closures, and divisive politics are a clarion call to reframe the moment to, as Janisse-Barlow says, “remember ourselves in the spaces where we collected to be artists.” Channel Surfing is not a critique of the loud and dominant, but a gentle reminder of the women who came before her as an artist taking her first tentative steps into the scene, at the time not noticing the specifics, but observing “the freak kitchen party of Windsor back then,” and finding her unique way into and along the memories and feeling-tones of the moments from her youth.
“This project is restorative,” she says. “I want to add to the conversation, to give back and give justice to some things that Windsor should love and cherish.”
The project is expected to be an ongoing practice, culminating in a larger exhibition, location to be determined.
DONA AND HER STRATOCASTER
Acrylic on Canvas, 5'8" x 5'8"
2023
