Flo Jacobs

An adult decides to escape the pressures of life and return to his old bedroom at his parents' house.

This exhibition focuses on Jonas Mekas’ 365 Day Project, a succession of films and videos in calendar form. Every day as of January 1st, 2007 and for an entire year, as indicated in the title, a large public (the artist's friends, as well as unknowns) were invited to view a diary of short films of various lengths (from one to twenty minutes) on the Internet. A movie was posted each day, adding to the previously posted pieces, resulting altogether in nearly thirty-eight hours of moving images.

In NERVOUS KEN, experimental film legend Ken Jacobs is "interviewed" by my urbane 12-year old M.C., Emma Bernstein. Envisioning an exploration of the nature of listening (of apprehending or not, remembering or not, and creating meaning) and of the repetitions & variations of verbal expression and its accompanying often-emphatic physical gesturing as a basis for making visual music, I, as filmmaker turned "media artist", employ the full range of temporal manipulation available within my concurrent digital set-up, exploiting unique corners which differentiate DV from 16mm, though including frequent references to themes & techniques from Jacobs' own work within the arcanum of film. The "musical score" is derived through permutations of the sync track. This was the first released section from the ongoing series, premiering March 2004 at the Museum of Modern Art.

For over 70 years, Jonas Mekas, internationally known as the "godfather" of avant-garde cinema, documented his life in what came to be known as his diary films. From his arrival in New York City as a displaced person in 1949 to his death in 2019, he chronicled the trauma and loss of exile while pioneering institutions to support the growth of independent film in the United States. Fragments of Paradise is an intimate look at his life and work constructed from thousands of hours of his own video and film diaries-including never-before-seen tapes and unpublished audio recordings. It is a story about finding beauty amidst profound loss, and a man who tried to make sense of it all... with a camera.

Unable to sleep, Jonas Mekas drifts through New York nights, moving between apartments, studios, galleries, bars, and clubs. Along the way he encounters friends and fellow artists—including Ken and Flo Jacobs and Yoko Ono—capturing an intimate mosaic of nocturnal encounters, reflections, and moments of community.

"The whole film are non-art portraits of people in which they do what they want with this hat – and therefore, act or stand in front of my camera. It’s only love: therefore it can’t harm you". Joyce Wieland.

Explores the life and career of cartoonist Art Spiegelman including the creation and ground-breaking impact of his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel MAUS.

A young woman stands by a car while scenes from metropolitan life flash by.

A wholesome moment: Jonas Mekas, MM Serra, Ken Jacobs, and Flo Jacobs take lavender from a stranger's bush.

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

A story told by director Ken Jacobs but without conventional storyline. Using a modified magic lantern, an early type of image projector developed in the 17th century, he morphs, flickering images that look like photo-negatives.

A short by Ken Jacobs. Taormina, Sicily; Mt. Etna erupting nearby.

A “Cinéma, de notre temps” series episode directed by french filmmaker Jackie Raynal, originally aired 29 May 2016.

In 1968, Noren finished Huge Pupils, a gorgeous, sensuous, sexually outrageous visual study of his daily life, and part I of an ongoing series he would come to call The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse.

Ken Jacobs’s most elusive and mysterious film is at once an allegory of movie-making, a demonstration of 8mm versatility, and a celebration of a now vanished neighborhood beneath the Brooklyn Bridge.

A celebration of Ken Jacobs' work at 80WSE.

Quartet Number One (1991) 8 min.

A picturing of sound in 3D.

Blankets for Indians blends a stereoscopic study of water spurting from New York’s City Hall fountain with an intimately detailed portrait of an Occupy Wall Street march. While in the process of shooting the fountain in 2012, Jacobs serendipitously turned his camera toward a large protest marching to Zuccotti Park in support of Occupy Wall Street. The unexpected connection gives the film new life, seamlessly moving between sensual observation and political commentary, reflection, and abstraction. Using freeze-frames, text, and 3D manipulation, Jacobs questions the contemporary conditions of socio-political struggle, its relation to aesthetics, and the labor necessary to produce both.

In celebration of his 80th birthday, here is: THE ETERNAL COURTSHIP (an ipad short) For Ken and Flo Jacobs, with love and affection from all of us out here who bask in the glow...