Jennifer West

Los Angeles-based artist Jennifer West was in residence to develop Film Memory, an installation in which she integrated 100 channels of film to explore cinema as a material repository of memory.

A night of unabashed film love that delved into the darkened make-out corners of cult and mid- night movie theaters, celebrated the circulation of VHS bootlegs, and tracked through the video rental houses, multi-screen drive-ins, discount multiplexes, art house theaters, lecture halls, and museums of film culture, ending up in today’s tangled web of digital file sharing and online- streaming platforms. An elegy to our ever- changing cinematic contexts and their continued transition to the virtual world, the event reached beyond the frame to reveal how our experience of celluloid and its circuits of distribution function both as a catalyst for personal memory and as a tool to trace unconsidered histories.

Jennifer West was in residence to develop Film Memory—a feature-length film and multi- channel installation exploring the moving image as material memory. Constructed as a “personal historical survey” of cinema, it captures and reconnects the places, spaces, languages, and memories that are born from the cinematic experience.