John Winn

A story of long, long ago. When the world was just beginning.

the franklinia flower, now extinct in the wild, appears here as a printed image (a drawing from 1782) pinned against a kitchen wall. hand and figure move disjointedly. the light of day gives way to electricity, to darkness, and to morning. recorded on a video camera built in 2002: an obsolete image tracing some accidental gestures and capturing a form of life existent only in cultivation. some fragments of vermeer, general electric, and chiquita brands international.

Actuality of a man inflating a woopie cushion in his home.

An oblique remake of Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1951), Ray’s Place follows Ray from his haunts in New York City to Binghamton where, exiled from Hollywood, he taught alongside members of the American avant-garde. Participating in both Hollywood’s golden age and the experimental cinema of the 1970s yet at home in neither, what is Ray’s place?

Time spent house-sitting for Fredric Jameson from 2020 until 2022. Assembled after his death as a memento for myself and others.

"Every single entity contains an adumbration or landskip of the whole Universe" (Jan Baptist van Helmont, 1650).

The narration—interrupted by the soundtrack of Alfred E. Green's 1948 western Four Faces West—describes a 19th century photograph by Timothy O’Sullivan, titled Historic Spanish Record of the Conquest. The photograph is slightly out of focus, pinned against a bluish wall, and flaps in response to the occasional wind of a droning fan. And there’s bit of sunlight, reflected against a map of the West Indies.

Located somewhere between the writings of Robert Smithson and the westerns of Howard Hawks—that somewhere being the present, momentarily suspended in a few video fragments of the landscape. A here and an elsewhere, a site (sight) and its nonsite (nonsight). Another movie adrift in the atmosphere. Pieces of information on the assembly and disassembly of Red River (1948) played and fast-forwarded against a background of fall leaves. Cattle, cowboys, and everything else that once made up the cinematic imaginary.

The landscape here is an assemblage of fragments—of disjuncts. Some vain repetitions as the season changes and a cloud passes by. "We are expected to rejoice in darkness, and triumph in mutability; to lay the foundation of happiness in things which momentarily change or fade; and to expect the utmost satisfaction and instruction from what it is impossible to arrest, and difficult to apprehend” -John Ruskin, 1856

Seven images, each staging their own disappearance.

“All that which in Picture is not of the body or argument thereof is Landskip, Parergon, or By-work” (Thomas Blount, Glossographia, 1656).

Study of a window frame that faces West in December of 2023, put together hastily on Saturday morning in July 2024.

Daily dedications to a minor artisan of the classical Hollywood western. Each segment was originally a kind of letter, a private correspondence, sent in fragments to a friend over a few weeks—an ode to R.G. but also to B.C. (an ode to cinema, to everyday life, and to the cinephilic fantasy of their becoming indistinguishable).

Set at an artificial reservoir in North Carolina, RESERVOIR (SEVEN FRAGMENTS) is a meditation on the unnatural histories of the American environment. The film approaches both the cinematic image and the landscape it captures as damaged, estranged things—things adrift in a world of irreparable discord.

Images of something like nature struggling to endure against the noise of an entropic electronic signal.

"A supplementary country called cinema … I began collecting stamps in my passport, with this infan­tile, idiotic, idea that I could set foot in all the countries of the world … Where I almost stumbled into catastrophe was when the postcard, a strange clandestine umbilical chord, couldn't be found." – Serge Daney

A solitary figure pirates "A Ilha dos Prazeres Proibidos" (Carlos Reichenbach 1979), while also downloading "Carson City" (André De Toth, 1952). We see some of the latter film. The figure departs, wakes up, to then go about his day, leaving the door open. It is early spring.