Paul Sharits (1943-1993)

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                Paul Sharits’s filmic work has been shown in major museums in one-artist exhibitions (lately at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York), group exhibitions and in the national and international film festivals. The Albright-Knox Art Gallery exhibition, organized by Assistant Curator Linda L. Cathcart, recognizes as obsolete the necessity to segregate the screening of avant-garde film into separate and specialized spaces, for audiences different from the regular museum audiences. Avant-garde film is to be considered as part of a whole context of contemporary art where the traditional boundaries between art forms have disappeared and have been replaced by a larger and more integrated vision.

                The exhibition includes two film installation pieces ten “frozen film frames”—16mm filmstrips mounted in plexiglass--, drawings and prints dating from 1966 to 1976. The two film installations, Shutter Interface, 1975 and Dream Displacement, 1976, are four-screen film projections in color, in which the four film loops are projected as a single image, accompanied by quadraphonic sound. Dream Displacement is on view in Gallery 16 from September 27 to October 17. Shutter Interface will be on view in the same space from October 19 to the 31^st. in a dialogue with Linda L. Cathcart in the exhibition catalogue, Paul Sharits says: “(With my films) I want to create intensified places. In a single-screen film you can only build up to a point…whereas I’d like the space itself to have a feeling of being ritualized…All my films have a little bit to do with meditation. These locational works become the ultimate field for that kind of contemplative reflection.”

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