Jamie Nares

Musician John Lurie knows nothing about fishing, but that doesn't stop him from embarking on fishing in exotic locations with friends.

In the years before Ronald Reagan took office, Manhattan was in ruins. But true art has never come from comfort, and it was precisely those dire circumstances that inspired artists like Jim Jarmusch, Lizzy Borden, and Amos Poe to produce some of their best works. Taking their cues from punk rock and new wave music, these young maverick filmmakers confronted viewers with a stark reality that stood in powerful contrast to the escapist product being churned out by Hollywood.

Exploring the pre-fame years of the celebrated American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and how New York City, its people, and tectonically shifting arts culture of the late 1970s and '80s shaped his vision.

Nares mocks up Ancient Rome by shooting in faux-classical sites including Tribeca's American Thread Building, where a decrepit penthouse loft with a peeling-paint dome serves as an echoey stand-in for the imperial palace. The latter location required ingenuity: Posing as potential renters, Nares and associates asked the manager to show them the apartment, then unlocked the windows on the way out; a few hours later, they broke back into the space, full cast and crew in tow, to shoot the necessary scenes.

Face Addict tells the story of a unique and unrepeatable experience, that of the artistic community in New York between the late '70s and early '80s, known as the downtown scene.

A “sci-fi povera” film shot on Super 8, Men in Orbit features musician Lurie and Eric Mitchell as chain-smoking astronauts in a decrepit New York living room that has been transformed into a spacecraft.

How to play a melody? A magic moment, unrepeatable. Life is just a bowl of cherries. Film as art as life as film.

An exploration of social schizophrenia in which terrorists consult their mothers before planting bombs, and the head of the New York City bomb squad succumbs to his dominatrix.

A hand descends, as though from the heavens, to manipulate a length of ribbon.

STREET is an unscripted 61-minute high definition video filmed by artist James Nares over one week in September 2011. The final video is a mesmerizing experiment in the nuance and beauty of everyday people and people-watching; providing a global view that extends beyond the streets of New York where it was filmed: from Battery Park to the furthest reaches of Upper Broadway, and West Side to East Side in Nares’ personal homage to actualité films.

Throwing and catching the same.

Mini-document of sculptural activity, involving the effects of gravity on weighty objects.

"Shortly after Amos went into home hospice he began filming ‘Adios’, a short film, compiled of 16mm and Super 8 footage, to premiere at his memorial, chronicling all the family and friends who have come to visit. Even Courtney our absolutely wonderful hospice nurse is in it. […] Only twice have we forgotten to film a visitor. Amos designated me the Director of Photography. Since I have to focus and shoot using my bad left eye the joke in our home is that it’s a film by a dying director and a blind DP." – Claudia Summers

Hand twirls a piece of fabric at 500 frames per second.

Collage of faces taken from television by James Nares

Freehand wall drawing of a perfect circle.

Choreographed and orchestrated, a rhythmic video music, made by hurling lengths of plastic pipe against a cinder block wall.

Wind currents on a debris-strewn street corner.

A semi-visible pianist plays. In memory of the poet, pianist and Judo black belt, David Rattray.

After Rome 78, Nares made a political documentary—a controversial 1980 video interview with an IRA member titled No Japs at My Funeral—but turned to other forms of art for much of the remaining decade, never realizing projects like a feature script he penned with Gary Indiana.