Julie Perini, Creation is Destruction: A Workshop on Film Decay
Description Julie Perini is an artist working in video, film, audio, installation and performance. She is also an assistant Professor of art at Portland State University. Big Film is an installation in which visitors experience a film as a three dimensional object. Ladders of plexiglass hanging from the ceiling display giant blowups of individual 16mm film frames. Light passing through this forest of frames, projects the images onto walls and onto visitors within, and outside of the installation. Big film grows out of Perini’s recent investigations into the material properties of celluloid film and her experiments with the decay of appropriated film, such as her 2011 creation, collaboration with the earth which involved cutting a moving-picture advertisement for General Electric into 2 second strips, and then unearthing one strip of film each day for twenty days. The film was then pieced back together so viewers could witness the gradual decay of the image and sound in the film, which had also corroded into brightly colored abstract compositions. Perini fashioned Big Film out of stills from collaboration with the earth, making public Perini’s private encounters with her collaborators: dirt, worms, water, and other earthly forces. julieperini.org