Heavily influenced by the avant-garde (Stan Brakhage and Chris Welsby most specifically) Jake Barningham envisions video as a medium struggling to exist. Barningham's work is concerned first and foremost with the textures, rhythms and colors possible in video. Largely using re-appropriated footage from amateur meteorologists across the country, the videos in this program re-envision landscapes not as majestic natural sculptures but as things, like video, that are struggling to exist: colors and shapes snap, gesticulate and then dissolve in a membrane of pixels. Trees and clouds shift restlessly against ill-defined spaces and tremble at the hand of invisible forces. Appropriately, Barmingham compares working in video to “sculpting with smoke.” His work has been shown at The Onion City Film Festival, as well as the Wisconsin International, Arkansas Underground, and Milwaukee Underground Film Festivals.
Program:
Hills (2011, 2min, DV, silent)
Easter (2011, 2min, DV, silent)
Color Copy (2011, 3min, DV, silent)
Trees (2011, 2min, DV, silent)
Again (2011, 4.5 min, DV, sound)
And Again (2011, 3min, DV, sound)
Charles Ives' Three Quarter-Tone Pieces "Chorale" (1924, 4.5min, CD)
Arrangements 1 (2011, 3min, DV, silent)
Arrangements 2 (2011, 2min DV, silent)
View from a Cemetery (2011, 4min, DV, silent)
A Pass (2011, 2min, DV, silent)
Silence (2011, 2min, DV, silent)
All (2011, 2min, DV, silent)
Parts (2011, 4min, DV, silent)
Tropical (2011, 5min, MiniDV, silent)
Back Yard (2011, 4min, DV, silent)
"Wood Cart Group"
1. Wood Cart (2011, 5min, DV, silent)
2. Sometimes at Night (2011, 6.5min, DV, silent)
3. I Hear Strange Laughter (2011, 6min, DV, silent)
4. Buster Keaton (2011, 5min, DV, silent)
Quotes about Jake Barningham's video work:
"There are shades of Stan Brakhage in Jake Barningham’s digital daydreams... In love with the textures of video, Barningham’s shorts transform the mundane into the gorgeously abstract, drowning signposts of daily life—houses, trees—in a churning ocean of digital noise." - A.A. Dowd, TimeOut Chicago
"[Barningham] understand(s) that abstraction is a necessary function of digitizing images, and [his] shorts, most of them silent, use the medium for its unique qualities of flicker and pixilation." - Fred Camper, The Chicago Reader
"What Barningham has managed to do is, simply put, more than akin to the poetry that Brakhage has imbued to celluloid. It is this critic’s opinion, whatever it may be worth, that Barningham is building a formidable body of work and quickly emerging at the forefront of this still new, not entirely understood, medium." - Dan Gorman,
truth24framespersecond.blogspot.comJake Barningham was born and raised in rural Wisconsin. He moved to Chicago, IL to pursue film studies and began making videos in 2004. His work has shown at The Onion City Film festival, The Wisconsin International Film Festival, Bearded Child Film Festival, The Iowa City Experimental Film Festival and The Milwaukee and Arkansas Underground Film Festivals. His work was also part of a the Three Person Show "After Image: New videos by Jake Barningham, Kyle Canterbury and Yoel Meranda" last Winter at Chicago Filmmakers. Barningham's work has also been featured internationally, in a program curated by Gabe Klinger: "Fragments of a room: A Sampling of Chicago's best film/video art" in Toronto, CA.
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