Intrepidly excavating the far reaches of pop culture and the darker corners of the American unconscious, Los Angeles-based filmmaker Michael Robinson has over the last fifteen years produced a sizable catalogue of singularly strange and intoxicatingly affecting short-form film and video works. Working largely with repurposed footage sourced from a variety of sources both recognizable (music videos, vintage television programs) and vaguely familiar (instructional videos, PSA clips), Robinson, through a shrewd blend of music, memory, and dark humor, manages to unearth something miraculous from these otherwise mundane materials. Filtered through his at once playful and incisive eye, these inherently nostalgic trappings take on an unexpectedly sinister dimension. Tonight's program, Robinson's first solo show in Los Angeles in seven years, covers over a decade of digital work, including the local premiere of his latest, the highly acclaimed Onward Lossless Follows.
Program:
Mad Ladders (2015, 10 min)
The General Returns From One Place to Another (2006, 11 min)
Hold Me Now (2008, 5 min)
The Dark, Krystle (2013, 10 min)
Onward Lossless Follows (2017, 17 min)
All Through the Night (2008, 4 min)
Line Describing Your Mom (2011, 6 min)
These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us (2010, 13 min)
Eerie, evocative and irresistible, Onward Lossless Follows proposes a password-protected love affair, a little vapour on Venus, and a horse with no name riding out in search of a better world.
- Andréa Picard, TIFF
Michael Robinson's dyspeptic pop concoctions can be unsettling... [He] mines artifacts of the too-recent past and explores their still-shifting meanings, these semiforgotten objects still rotting atop our collective cultural garbage heap.
- Genevieve Yue, Artforum
[Robinson's] career as visual cultural critic is at its most disturbing in [Onward Lossless Follows] as he implements internet culture: stock videos, text chat, and other digital artifacts that feel sharp and hyper-real compared to his usual fuzzy, nostalgic outlook.
- Z. W. Lewis, The Brooklyn Rail
More than any other work of Robinson’s, The General Returns achieves something heady, ethereal, altogether mysterious and nearly impossible to define. [My] immediate reaction was a mixture of seduction and befuddlement, the sense that an audio-visual world for which I had no available vocabulary or affective framework had just opened up before my eyes.
- Michael Sicinski, Cinema Scope
(Available to download after screening date)