Cinema Artists-in-Residence

Collaborators since 2000, Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder stage the scene of film as orphaned object through the temporal labor of a moving image installation. They unite the rich traditions of experimental filmmaking, particularly the structuralist and materialist strands, and the multimodal sensibility of expanded cinema that emerged in the 1960s, which wove the moving image into the dynamic space of performance, sound, and audience interaction. Their larger body of work explores this interstice between avant-garde film practice and the incorporation of moving images and time-based media into museums and art galleries.

As Cinema Arts Artists-in-Residence, Gibson and Recoder present a solo exhibition, Gibson + Recoder: Powers of Resolution, which includes two site-specific commissions, Obsucrus Projectum and Illuminatoria. Each engages with the transformative and cinematic qualities of light. Powers of Resolution is the first entry in Cinema Arts’ two-year project Lightplay.

Gibson + Recoder: Powers of Resolution is part of the project Lightplay organized by Cinema Arts at the Exploratorium. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Installation view of Topsy-Turvy: A Camera Obscura Installation, Mad.Sq.Art, New York 2013; Photo by Colin Douglas Gray.

Dave Cerf is a filmmaker, musician, sound artist, and software designer based in San Francisco. During his residency, Cerf is creating a unique and dynamic soundscape for the Exploratorium's new Forum, and also composing a new soundtrack for a specially selected work from our cinema arts collection.

Film and video maker Michael Rudnick has presented more than 100 works at various venues including the San Francisco Cinematheque, SFMoMA, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Cannes Film Festival, and Anthology Film Archives. His solo exhibitions have been featured at the Netherlands Film Museum, California Museum of Visual Art in Sonoma, and at Questa College in San Luis Obispo. Rudnick has received more than 20 grants and awards including the Phelan Award, the SECA Award, and multiple awards from film festivals, which includes three times at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. He has been in residencies at the Exploratorium and at the Tryon Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. He has also designed and given workshops at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, at UCLA, Cal State University at Humboldt, and Utrecht School of Art, Netherlands. He was co-founder of No Nothing Cinema, and received his BFA and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1973 and 1975, respectively.

As a Cinema Artist in Residence, Rudnick has created a series of high- and low-tide studies along the shore, multiple time-lapse videos from the roof of Pier 15, and a longer-form meditation on time and tide along the Embarcadero—all currently on view in the Bay Observatory Gallery.

Sam Green is a San Francisco-based filmmaker who received his master's degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied documentary with acclaimed filmmaker Marlon Riggs. His most recent projects are the "live" documentaries Utopia in Four Movements (2010) and The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, which premiered May 1, 2012, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. Both works were performed live, with Green narrating and musicians performing the soundtrack. Green's 2004 feature-length film, the Academy Award-nominated documentary The Weather Underground, tells the story of a group of radical young women and men who tried to violently overthrow the United States government during the late 1960s and '70s. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and has screened widely around the world. Green currently teaches at the University of San Francisco and the San Francisco Art Institute and has been a resident at the MacDowell Colony, the Bellagio Study and Conference Center, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts.

Paul Clipson is a San Francisco-based filmmaker and experimental film artist whose work involves projected installation and live collaborative performances with sound artists and musicians. His largely improvised, in-camera-edited films bring to light subconscious preoccupations and unexpected visual forms. His works have been exhibited and performed both nationally and internationally at such festivals as the New York Film Festival, Edinburgh Film Festival, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival.

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Filmmaker Paul Clipson describes his artistic process and his experience as an Exploratorium Artist in Residence.