Jennifer West

Experimentation with materials can lead to a whole new world of work. That's what Jennifer West discovered when she attempted to see what would happen to film when it was exposed to not just the normal set of developing chemicals. She creates films that come out in a dazzling array of colors and run at a seemingly frantic pace. The colors and scratches are all results of intentional scratches and baths in liquids. A former teacher at USC, one of her recent works involved students donning lipstick and kissing each frame of the film. The result is a neon arrangement of lip prints strobing along the screen.

West does not intend for her films to be viewed like narrative movies. Instead, she sees them more as abstract paintings that adorn the walls of a gallery. They just so happen to be painted by projector rather than brush. As she showed films during the talk, West was visibly uneasy by the audience watching her films in their whole forms and one after another. When viewed in this manner, the viewer expects a narrative or some sort of story arc. On the walls of a gallery, the paintings are free to be judged aesthetically and the method used to create them can be pondered.

Last year, West created an exhibited a piece at the Tate Modern Gallery in London. For the piece, she took over a large ramp in the middle of the museum and brought in skateboarders to ride down the ramp over film laid out on the ground. For a few hours, skateboarders took over part of the Tate Modern and took their hobby from the street to the unfamiliar gallery. While West had originally wanted to pull skaters in from the street around the gallery, safety guidelines for the gallery forced her to use professional skateboarders. It is an unfortunate compromise that many artists must make when creating art for larger institutions. West said that though it was disappointing, it did not compromise the integrity of the entire piece. After the day of skateboarding finished, she scrambled to develop the film overnight for a showing the next day. The Tate decided to show her film in a theater the next day where viewers watched the film in it's entirety, making West slightly uneasy. While she concedes that the Tate ended up influencing the piece a little more than she had hoped, the overall experience was a good experience that helped her bring her art to a large new audience. In the process, she also got to slide down the Tate Modern on a skateboard.