orensanz summer museum ACTIVITIES

September 27th - 1pmVIDEO-SCREENING

Donna Cameron

The Orensanz Portfolio*

Duration 80’
* Featured in the 51st Venice Biennale Venice, Italy. Directed and edited by Donna Cameron. U.S., 80 minutes. Produced by Al Orensanz, The Angel Orensanz Foundation for the Arts, NY.

“Donna Cameron has launched an extraordinary portrait of a working artist in “The Orensanz Portfolio”. Like her acclaimed collage portrait of the late filmmaker Shirley Clarke, this portrait is both a recycling of old content and a birth of the new cool. Her film, as she describes it, is “new active cinema”, inspired by interactive art, and having no beginning and no conclusion. The viewer’s active mind is the alpha and omega of the timeline. Her video is a redefinition of the Orensanz persona within and without the context of her insightful collection and assemblage of his own documentation of his international art installations, “Earth”. She is very much an archivist, a curator, a filmmaker, and at once singular and plural.”

William Sloan, Curator and Chief Emeritus, Museum of Modern Art Circulating Film and Video Library

“To create anew with pre-existing materials, this is the paradigm of our age.” Donna Cameron, filmmaker

Donna Cameron’s The Orensanz Portfolio engages Angel Orensanz, whose art and sculpture is the subject of the film, in a montage of his international self-documentation. The increasing number of shorts structured into this feature omnibus portrays Orensanz working in exotic locations around the world. Cameron and Orensanz consider this montage a work of New Active Cinema, and view “The Orensanz Portfolio” as an open platform of no determined time. The meditation and fascination with circles in orbit on landscape include “Do Sakuras Blossom in Winter?” (Tokyo and Akita, Japan); “Windswept Moves” (Prades, France); “House of Chairs” (Lower East Side, NY, U.S.); “Iconic Fires” (Paris, France); “Day and Night” (Venice, Italy); “Waterscapes” (Brussels, Belgium); “Early Blooms” (Central Park, New York, NY).

“Art comes at us from an oblique angle. It is not a phenomenon that we achieve through direct confrontation...Art cannot be only literal and direct. It needs the material metaphor, and this is exactly what Angel Orensanz gives us. His forms and environments, his quixotic resolutions and dissolutions are about birth and destruction at a simultaneous instant. His art is ironically about the big bang of the universe-the life-death syndrome- where the birth of something fantastic appears in the process of disintegrating...What is the reason for life if not to reach the heights of our sensory and intellectual capacities, to mold these two aspects of living into a single holistic vision of who we are, and thus, to define our direction of future life?”

Robert C. Morgan, International Art Critic, Curator, Author

DONNA CAMERON BIO
http://www.donnacameron.info
Donna Cameron, Video Artist in residence at the Angel Orensanz Foundation since 2005, is the author of many portfolios of photography and film. Her work explores the relationship of the film frame in new active media. Donna Cameron is a Rockefeller nominee, and has been awarded three MacDowell fellowships and two Jerome fellowships for her work in film and new active media. Her films have been purchased and archived by the Museum of Modern Art Department of Film & Video. She holds a U.S. Patent for her invention, Cinematic Paper Emulsions (CPE), with which she has produced many cinematic works. All of her CPE films have been shown at the MoMA. Her work is distributed by the MoMA Circulating Film Library, and is in collections at NYU, Anthology Film Archives and the Filmmakers Co-Op, NY, Canyon Cinema, San Francisco, CA, Light Cone, Paris, France. She was included in the MoMA’s 20th century retrospective of visual art, “MoMA 2000, Making Choices, Part 2”, in June, 2000; and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 20th century retrospective, “The Color of Ritual, The Color of Thought: Women in Avant-Garde Film in America”, 1944-2000, September 2000; the 51st and the 52nd Venice Biennale of Art, Venice Italy; the Millennium, NY. She teaches at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and is an alumna of TSOA’s ITP program.

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
CIRCULATING FILM AND VIDEO LIBRARY
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email: kitty_Cleary@moma.org
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