Paul Sharits (1943-1993)

For the Burchfield Penney Art Center’s inaugural exhibition in The Project Space in November 2008, we presented Declarative Mode: Paul Sharits’ Bicentennial Film. In addition to the film, the exhibition included 18 “Scores” for Declarative Mode from the Burchfield Penney Art Center’s collection that Sharits used to outline the film in a way other filmmakers use a storyboard. Proto-Score is unaffiliated with a particular film and could stand as an aesthetically pleasing work on paper. However, it also demonstrates his compositional technique of linear color patterning to create non-narrative films, specifically accounting for each frame’s time span in film’s 24-frames per second format.