Ernie Gehr: What is an Unfinished Work?

For nearly fifty years, artist Ernie Gehr has transformed his deep knowledge of the moving image into a distinct vision of cinema’s potential for interpreting and fragmenting reality. With an astute, often humorous, appreciation for the limits and possibilities of the frame, Gehr has, since the mid-1960s, created a large, radical body of work that continues to challenge and surprise audiences. He uses his camera as a tool for creating new modes of perception. With few words, no characters, and no plots, his films, video work, and installations push us to re-imagine our own relationships to time and space.

There are a multiplicity of adjectives that fit Ernie Gehr’s experimental film and digital work: abstract, beautiful, mysterious, invigorating, utopian.
-- Manohla Dargis, New York Times, 11/11/11

In Gehr’s hands, the camera seems to take on magical properties, able to transform the most quotidian object or environment –– the pattern of sunlight on a wall, a busy street -- into marvelous and unexpected phenomena.
-- Ernie Gehr’s Marvelous Cinema, Harvard Film Archive

Join us for screenings at 5:30 and Gehr’s Experimental Lecture at 7:00

Free and open to the public.

5:30 Pre-lecture 16mm screening of Serene Velocity (1970), Shift (1972-74) and Rear Window (1986/1991)

6:30 Artist reception

7:00 Experimental Lecture with screenings of Lisa and Suzanne (1968-69), Untitled: Part 1 (l981), Coney Island Boardwalk (2013)

For more information: Dan Streible (dan.streible@nyu.edu) or Lynne Sachs (lynnesachs@gmail.com)