WUFF: More Than One Present

16mm expanded cinema performances by Guy Sherwin and Lynn Loo.

WUFF is thrilled to partner with the Winnipeg Film Group–currently celebrating their 50th year as an organization–for a special presentation of live expanded cinema work for multiple projectors by Guy Sherwin and Lynn Loo.

Based in London, UK, and working primarily with 16mm film, Sherwin and Loo’s performance work explores structural, spatial, material and temporal intervention. Occasionally poetic and contemplative, elsewhere concerned with rhythm and minimalist form, this survey documents an arc of work by two important figures in expanded cinema, demonstrating there can be more than one past and more than one present.

Included in the program is a special 50th anniversary presentation of Paper Landscape (1975), Sherwin’s seminal, beguiling self-portrait work, opening a portal across time via projected light and a painted screen.

Paper Landscape | Guy Sherwin (1975, 16mm)
Expanded film performance for transparent screen and white paint, projector. Paper Landscape plays with the illusory space within the screen by working directly with the material of the screen. A live performance is played off against a filmed record of a past event.

Railings | Guy Sherwin (1977, 16mm vertical projection, optical sound)
One of a series of films that investigates qualities of sound that can be generated directly from the image track. The images that you see are simultaneously scanned by the optical sound reader in the projector, which converts the into sound. This particular film makes use of the aural effect of visual perspective; the steeper the perspective on the railings, the closer the intervals of black and white, and the higher the frequency of sound. I also wanted to find out what freeze frames and visual strobe would ‘sound’ like. Visual strobe is created both in the camera – (camera shutter v. railings) and in the printer (printer shutter v. slipping frames).

Cycles #3 | Guy Sherwin (2003, 2 x 16mm)
A two-projector film event using images and sounds made directly by hand. The film is a development of Cycles 1 (1972/77) in which paper dots are stuck onto the surface of the film and onto its optical sound track. On projection these separate instants are converted simultaneously into picture and sound. The gaps between the dots gradually decrease until a fusion of the material occurs: the separate image-moments become a pulsating ball of light, while the rhythmic sound-moments join into a continuous rising drone.

Autumn Fog | Lynn Loo (2010, 2 x 16mm)
16mm film is used to capture the light and colours of autumn in my garden. The camera takes a secondary role by being stationary while it captures movement of light through the nature in the garden. Similar processes to those used in End Rolls are applied to fog the film. To explore further the colours in film, the positive film and the negative film are projected together, on top of one another.

Asanoha | Lynn Loo (2023, multi-16mm)
Asanoha–which translates to “hemp leaf” in Japanese–is a performance and materialist film intervention utilizing the traditional geometric pattern of the same name. The six-star shape that forms the basis of the pattern is said to symbolize growth, vigor, resistance, and prosperity. –WUFF

Washi MM | Lynn Loo (2017, multi-16mm)
A continuing series using patterned washi tape on 16mm clear film to explore lines, shapes, shadows, depth and light through rhythmic changes in the patterns that create the images and sound of the films. Inspiration for this work originated from when I first saw Mary Martin’s Drawings for Expanded Permutation (1969), last displayed at Annely Juda Fine Art in 2013.