Artists Space

Summer Knowledge:
Michael Robinson
Flowers in the Attic

Film Screening
December 4, 2009, 7:30pm

Since 2000, Michael Robinson has created a body of film and video work that combines the formal vocabulary of avant-garde cinema with evocative appropriations of late 20th-century media artifacts, blending these materials into distinctively uncanny experiences, structured with the soft seductions of a pop song. Videogame environments and Catholic liturgy, the anodyne aesthetics of National Geographic and a histrionic scene from Little House on the Prairie flow together to explore the contours of collective memory through a poetics of devotion and loss.

A ghostly, blurry figure in white with their arms out with digital light blurs swirled around.
Michael Robinson. Still from All Through the Night, 2008. [A ghostly, blurry figure in white with their arms out with digital light blurs swirled around.]

Titles include:
Chiquitita and the Soft Escape, 16mm, 2003, 10 mins
you don’t bring me flowers, 16mm, 2005, 8 mins
The General Returns from One Place to Another, 16mm/video, 2006, 11 mins
And We All Shine On, 16mm, 2006, 7 mins
Victory Over the Sun, 16mm, 2007, 13 mins
Hold Me Now, video, 2008, 5 mins
All Through the Night, video, 2008, 5 mins
If There Be Thorns, 16mm/video, 2009, 12 mins

A digitally rendered image of a green with mountains in the background, pixellated with horizontal lines.
Michael Robinson. Still from And We All Shine One, 2006. [A digitally rendered image of a green with mountains in the background, pixellated with horizontal lines.]
A man and a woman, facing each other. The woman is yelling, apparently in anger. There is overlaid text at the bottom. "Stay with me" in light blue, and "let lovin start" written twice in white.
Michael Robinson. Still from Hold Me Now, 2008. [A man and a woman, facing each other. The woman is yelling, apparently in anger. There is overlaid text at the bottom. "Stay with me" in light blue, and "let lovin start" written twice in white.]
A hand reaches toward the bark of a tree, drawing a thick red line. There are leaves in the background.
Michael Robinson. Still from If There Be Thorns, 2009. [A hand reaches toward the bark of a tree, drawing a thick red line. There are leaves in the background.]
An empty pool with weeds growing out of cracks. There are trees and bushes in the background, and a pink glow on the righthand edge, as if from a sunspot.
Michael Robinson. Still from Victory Over the Sun, 2007. [An empty pool with weeds growing out of cracks. There are trees and bushes in the background, and a pink glow on the righthand edge, as if from a sunspot.]