Intersection2015

On the corner of Brooktondale Rd and route 79 near Ithaca is an amazing planting of Forget-Me-Nots and Dandelions. An improbable dance between different layers of reality, one organic, the other mechanical, another the numbing everyday. Timeless fragility joust with fleeting enamels and the upstanding violence.

On Vincent Grenier's Video Intersection
 
Cars were just part of the traffic in the hillside,
A brook of the buzz there.
Caught like decals on the meadow
But not sticking anywhere, the only pollen
On them photonic, budding in eyes,
Coursing through chiasma to be switched out
 
Across the banks of sight (feathery with morning,
Stark speckled at dusk). Do they intrude? Their
Speed makes them spectral, only part of slope memory,
Until the rigs turn through–­­–all chrome & red today––
Long mirrors of the lanes, converting to rust
This field they pass, till sleep's dark rise
 
Lifts them to longer
Trees on the ridge,
Nests in acacia, clouds of pine.
 
– Walter K. Lew

Festival Selections:
• 53rd New York Film Festival, Projections, Program 2, Fri. Oct 2, 4:15 pm & Sat Oct 3, 2:00 pm at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, NYC.
https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2015/films/projections-2015-program-2/
Program includes films and video by Charlotte Pryce, Janie Geiser, Alexandre Larose, Emmanuel Lefrant, Jodie Mack, Laura Kraning and Heather Trawick.
• 44th Festival du Nouveau Cinema, FNC Prgrm Lab 2, Sat. Oct 10, 15:00 Salle J.A. De Seve, (Concordia University) and Fri. Oct 16, 13:00, Pavillon Judith Jasmin Annexe (Salle J.C. Lauzon), Montreal, Canada.
http://www.nouveaucinema.ca/en/films/intersection
• Transient Visions: Festival of the Moving Image 2015, Oct 17, 8:00 pm Spool Mfg., Johnson City, NY
• Les Rendez Vous du Cinéma Québecois 2016, Programme Art Vidéo, Sat Feb. 20th, 2:30 pm Cinématheque Québecoise, Salle Claude Jutra, Montréal, Québec
• 2016 Athens International Film and Video Festival, “New Horizon”, Athens, Ohio. April 4. 3:00 pm
• Experiments in Cinema, Experiment 2, Guild Cinema, Albuquerque, NM. 5:30 pm, April 5, 2016
• Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, Union Cinema, Program 1, April 29th 2016.

Reviews:

ARTFORUM online:
New York Film Festival: Projections by Tony Pipolo. 9.30.2015,
http://artforum.com/film/id=55207

"As always, there are familiar names as well as new ones; and as to be expected, the works vary not only in focus and style but in merit as well. Against those digital pieces enamored of postmodern pretensions, there are plenty of artists for whom the digital is not a route to facile thinking but an opportunity for exciting new ways to create.
Among the latter is Lewis Klahr, whose unfailing instinct for generating “action” in the fleeting intervals between and superimpositions of still images is apparent in Mars Garden, an episode from his series exploring links between Greek myths and comic-book superheroes. Equally unmistakable is Vincent Grenier’s uncanny sense of camera placement and the enigmatic relation of foreground to background this produces—evident in this year’s Intersection—and Janie Geiser’s gift for cutting between private, encoded images to create dense montages that defy ready interpretation, as vibrant as ever in Cathode Garden. These elegantly conceived, shot, and constructed gems bear the indelible signs of irreplaceable moving-picture artists." 

MUBI Notebook:
NYFF 2015, Projections: Flipping Through Channels, Michael Sicinski, Oct 2, 2015, https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/nyff-projections-highlights

"My top Ten Projections Films: These are the top ten films I saw originally at the NYFF Projections Festival. Some of the best selections in the festival are films I already wrote about during my TIFF Wavelengths coverage (shorts, features) including Lois Patino’s Noite Sem Distancia, Ben Russell’s YOLO, Charlotte Pryce’s Prima Materia, Peter Tscherkassky’s The Exquisite Corpse, and Isiah Medina’s 88:88."

8. Intersection (Vincent Grenier, U.S. / Canada)
“Grenier's work is consistently characterized by small-scale landscape study, usually taken as an opportunity for an examination of the pleasures and vicissitudes of color and light. Unlike so many other artists working in this formalist vein, Grenier almost always finds room in his work for wry, subtle humor, which makes him kind of a treasure, especially in the often grim, strait-laced world of the avant-garde. His latest, Intersection, has a built-in pun: it is in fact shot at an intersection, where a spur street meets a state highway in Ithaca, NY. Grenier trains his camera on a patch of wildflowers up on a hill overlooking the intersection. But this means that the cars and trucks moving in and out of the streets consistently penetrate the image field. Grenier uses complex digital editing to push and pull the vehicles into the image, smearing them or taking them apart. So the result is a baseline painterly image in the Impressionist vernacular, constantly interrupted, blended, and yes, intersected by hard enamel, color field, AbEx, and Pop coloration. Confounding? Well, yes. But mom always told you to stay out of the street.”

Projections Program 2. Reviewed by Connor Newton
Posted May 21, 2016 - FilmMattersMagazine.com
Grenier’s Intersection works as a juxtaposition between the natural and the mechanical. Grenier places his camera at an intersection near Ithaca, NY, to capture the daily dance among nature, car, and road. Intersection jostles between shots of a flower-filled corner of a road and shots of cars zooming by, blurring the screen and eclipsing the foliage. Grenier replaces the colors of the flowers with that of the speeding cars, their paint streaking across the frame like an impressionistic brushstroke. Grenier perfectly selects his stills to capture the images of vehicles in their most distorted and stretched forms, frozen masses of kinetic energy. Additionally, while most films lacked a score, Grenier utilizes the sounds of cars passing, which, matched with the constant movement between his frames, grants an illusion of movement. Intersection presents our daily act of transportation as a disruption of one idea of beauty, of our ability to perceive our natural environment; but Grenier also generates a different aesthetic with the disrupting cars: Grenier’s palette consists of the colorful burst of the cars onto the screen.