Directing
Joshua Gen Solondz assmbles footage shot around the world over the past decade and manipulates it into a blurred compendium that privileges darkness and abstraction over the picturesque to an intense, strobing degree.
Moon and sun are elliptically and stroboscopically conjured in Joshua Gen Solondz’s cloistered yet operatic Luna e Santur. In milky, hand-processed images, hooded figures recalling Magritte’s The Lovers enact a series of rituals in which an old trauma is remembered and exorcized.
I made a microphone. I asked for a friend's help to shoot. I asked for a friend to provide a condom. I asked for a film lab that would process the film for me. (the lab tends to ruin my films) I wrap the microphone in the condom, tell my friend to start shooting, and try to swallow what I've made. - JGS
A colourful implo/explosion of the twelve sided star.
Single-channel excerpt from installation series. "An exchange between [the filmmaker's] mother and him in a series of banal, intimate actions: He is attempting to fit her prosthetic breast onto his chest. It doesn’t fit very well, so they try another one. She takes out a bathroom scale and tries to weigh them. “It’s less than a pound, so it doesn’t show,” she said flatly. After wiggling one into a silk bra, she goes to the sink and takes a pill. The film is shot mostly from her point of view at his chest, and we only see her face for barely a second at the very end. We see the back of her head the rest of the time, as she is crouching down in her nightgown weighing the gelatin inserts." — Tiffany Sia
35mm of collaged film material reading like a diary without linear thought or narrative. A hodgepodge of photographic images spliced and taped with ecstatic handmade explosions of colour and texture. A fragmentary experience that revels in the material and provides an opaque and impenetrable portrait of the maker.
Shot between Hong Kong, Japan, and the US, this short is Joshua Gen Solondz’s most ambitious work to date, a portrait of the home and the world that is dense, textured, creepy, anxious, noisy, silly, and confounding, but always tender.
Challenging the romanticization of west coast scenery, Josh Solondz creates a starling work of land art in Against Landscape. Whether political, performative, or both, the artist's plucky gesture and the video's precise framing limn the limits of control.
Three years living in Sunset Park, living between the BQE and the Greenwood Cemetery, accumulating footage of junkyard cats, Park Slope strollers, burned out cars, flying birds.
Accumulated over three years, Joshua Gen Solondz’s film is a crowded collage of gurgling paint, jagged splices, errant sprocket holes, and puzzling images that conjure the densely material frames of the late queer avant-garde filmmaker Luther Price. A messy assemblage in purples and oranges, NE Corridor is at once a visceral explosion of color and a tortured object.
Percussive reedit of military tech videos and their heavy metal soundtrack.
Nightmare Arson Fire combines multiple attempts at contact printing a badly decayed roll of film retrieved from a Brooklyn basement after a fire.
Essentially a trance-inducing flicker film, Prisoner’s Cinema opens by establishing a simple, yet aggressive, black and white flashing sequence, defined by its frenetic pace and hypnotic pattern. It assaults and entrances the viewer with its rapid optical rhythm; a low-toned droning sound and a high frequency stuttering provide a sonic anchor that augments the hypnotic effects of the flashing imagery.
A “glitch-filled revision of a monster classic. As pixels melt, stick and stutter, Godzilla arises and the world decays, a startling vision of mutation and destruction." (Chi-hui Yang)
FOLLOW FOLD BURY EAT BURN FORGET TAKE
A meditation on cultural appropriation and nature's myth. Prompted by Roland Barthes' "Mythologies", the videomakers have found a microcosm of the new age wasteland within little fountains. The work is an object focused meditation within a young woman's life is brought to attention.
A film diary. 673 finger/toe nails saved, a large mess of 16mm rescued from darkroom garbage bins. The former adhered with nail polish topcoat to the latter, optically printed, and finished as a print.
A work-in-progress/unreleased film by Joshua Gen Solondz.
