Ken Jacobs

Ken Jacobs

Ontic Antics 2006–9

27 March–29 May 201027 Mar–29 May 2010

Over the last fifty years, New York film artist Ken Jacobs has made a massive contribution to experimental film and expanded-cinema performance. He is known for his pioneering two-hour 1969 structuralist film Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son, which probes, deconstructs, and reorganises a D. W. Griffith short. In recent years, Jacobs has moved into video, creating a number of works based on nineteenth and early twentieth-century stereoscopic photographs. He plays with the juxtaposition, overlay, and stroboscopic alternation of right-eye and left-eye images to generate a variety of spatial and kinetic illusions and phenomenological effects, often keyed back to the subject matters of the original images, which include children labouring in a factory and faces in a crowd. The films come with health warnings for epileptics. Jacobs explains, ‘The throbbing flickering is necessary to create “eternalisms”: unfrozen slices of time, sustained movements going nowhere and unlike anything in life.’ He advises his viewers to ‘sail through any initial discomforts; the brain is a muscle that can be sluggish and grumpy when asked to learn new tricks.’

The IMA acknowledges, thanks, and pays our deepest respect to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people that we work with and the Country we work on. 

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