Rodney Graham
The Green Cinematograph (Programme 1: Pipe smoker and overflowing sink)
2010
Custom Projector with looper, 16mm film, 5min 35sec silent film

This piece is up in Chelsea at a show looking at the Marx brothers impact on art and culture at 303 Gallery. The video piece is surely great, but the custom projector was just fabulous- dropping a sloppy pile of film within its green guts only to somehow not get it tangled and eat it back up again in an endless loop. I wish I could better describe this projector… sorry for my clunky photograph with reflections, the situation was not destined for a good documentation shot and for whatever reason, I can’t seem to find a good image of this on the web. The idea of customizing the entirety of a piece’s presentation, down to the projector, changes our relationship to looping video. It reminds us not to simply drop-in on the video piece in the corner, but stop and pause over its miraculous endlessness.