Urban Video Project and Light Work are pleased to announce the exhibition of Still Raining, Still Dreaming by experimental filmmaker Phil Solomon at UVP Everson from November 12 – December 21, 2013.

Still Raining, Still Dreaming, with its haunting soundtrack, will also be the debut of UVP’s new sound system at the UVP Everson plaza, a milestone for UVP that will significantly expand programming options for the venue.

Still Raining, Still Dreaming will open on November 12 for a special Tuesday night projection in conjunction with the screening, Avant Gaming: video art on video games, at 6:30pm in the Everson’s Hosmer Auditorium. Please consult the Avant Gaming event page for more information. A reception will follow on the plaza. Three more films from Solomon’s “Grand Theft Auto” series – Crossroad (2005), Rehearsals for Retirement (2007), and Last Days in a Lonely Place (2008), will be screened as part of Avant Gaming.

Still Raining, Still Dreaming is part of Solomon’s acclaimed “Grand Theft Auto” series, a body of work shot entirely within the virtual world of the Grand Theft Auto video game and is shown in conjunction with the Everson’s exhibition of the Smithsonian traveling show, The Art of Video Games.

About the Work

Still Raining, Still Dreaming
2008-9 | Total Run Time: 12:14

Still Raining, Still Dreaming repurposes the virtual world of the controversial “Grand Theft Auto” video game series, with its imperatives to random violence and crime, transforming Liberty City, the fictitious metropolis based on New York City in which the game is set, into a reflective space of stillness: depopulated of players, full of melancholy, longing, and moments of compelling poetic beauty.

The Grand Theft Auto works mark an interesting departure for Solomon, a filmmaker best known for his large body of optically printed, densely textured films. However, the works in this series of machinima (a term used to designate videos which are created using real-time computer graphics engines, most commonly video games) achieve similarly haunting effects. Using “cheat codes” and exploiting the “open world” environment of Grand Theft Auto’s game design, Solomon’s lens, often dappled with virtual rain, lingers on the surreal shop fronts, vacant parks, and abandoned basements of Liberty City. In this simulacrum, Solomon’s work suggests, the “ghost in the machine” is our own.

About the Artist

Phil Solomon (b. 1954; Manhattan, NY) has been a presence in the avant-garde film world for over 20 years. Solomon received his BA in filmmaking from SUNY Binghamton in 1975 and his MFA in filmmaking from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1980. He has been a professor of Film Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder since 1991, where he met, taught alongside, and sometimes collaborated with elder statesman of American avant-garde film, Stan Brakhage.
Solomon’s work has been screened and exhibited widely, including the Rotterdam Film Festival (Rotterdam, NL); “Views from the Avant-Garde” at the New York Film Festival; the Whitney Musuem of Art (New York, NY), Anthology Film Archives (New York, NY); the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY); the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, OH); the Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago, IL); RedCat (Los Angeles, CA); The Pacific Film Archive (Berkley, CA), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, CA), among many others. His work has twice been featured in the Whitney Biennial (2002 and 1995). In 2010, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. exhibited a specially commissioned six channel video installation titled American Falls in conjunction with a three program survey of his work at the National Gallery of Art.

To learn more about Solomon’s work, visit the artist’s Vimeo page

Sponsors

This exhibition was supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.