Lynn Marie Kirby has been working with ideas of intimate and cultural landscapes across the materials of film, video, sound and light for almost two decades.
Her work is constantly on the edges/boundaries of the medium with which she is working, yet the subject of her work reaches a broad audience, exploring very real and intimate personal stories that are both literary and experimental.
She challenges our concepts of framing, in terms of structures like narrative and documentary, as well as the literal way we look at framed images. Her work deals with love and death, exuberance and loss, themes present as much through editing - the use of pulses, freezes, glitches - as through characters and settings.
This is participatory cinema. As viewers we are asked to complete the cycle of looking, to bring our own experience to the work which is at once poetic and complex, and often quite humorous.
Her work has shown internationally at festivals in London, Athens, Istanbul and Oberhausen and she has had one person shows in numerous museums and galleries including the Museum of Modern Art and Artist Space in New York, George Pompidou Centre and Theatre de L'Entrepot in Paris, LACE in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Cinematheque and Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.
Several films won First Place awards at the San Francisco Art Institute and Big Muddy Film Festivals, Second Place awards at Onion City, Chicago, Ann Arbor and Women in the Director's Chair Festivals. She has received support for her work from a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Regional Fellowships and Film Arts Foundation grants, as well as support from the Jerome Foundation and the Kelsey Street Press.
In addition to her production and installation work, Lynn has taught film and video production and theory, emphasizing a cross disciplinary approach to the fields of film, video, performance, sound and critical media studies. She is currently a Professor at the California College of Arts and Crafts.
I made this film when I rode the bus daily. Sometimes I miss watching and eavesdropping now that I have a car. Award: Honorary Mention, UICA Film Festival
1976, 16mm, b&w/so, 6m, $20
Made with Don Lloyd.
This is a comedy about a cat going out for a walk on a leash. This modern metaphor is derived from the juxtaposition of dialectical recidivism and the vindication of self. Sexual and economic repression provide a background for the never-ending struggle of time against the arrival of the household robot, as humankind continues to claw at its environment.
Awards: Big Muddy Film Festival; Palo Alto Film Festival.
1978, 16mm, b&w/so, 7.5m, $20
A film about choice. I feel it is every woman's choice, regardless of economics, whether or not to have children. This is a film about abortion, specifically state funding of abortion. The government has cut out funding of abortion except when the life of the mother is endangered. The woman writes a response in large pink letters to the senator's refrain: "Try, really try not to get knocked up in the future."
Awards: First Prize, SF Art Institute Film Festival; Ann Arbor Film Festival and Tour.
1980, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 14m, $45
I witness shocking events which remain unresolved. This is an urban story, it is the story of an event which takes place across from my third floor bedroom window. As the story is retold again and again the emphasis shifts from the details of the event to the unanswered questions raised by the event.
Exhibition: Big Muddy Film Festival; SF Art Institute Film Festival.
1982, 16mm, color/so, 3m, $30
A film about learning and about memories which surface to distort present moments. The seasons change and so do the facts. Bright colored images trigger events and past experiences resurface to influence today's convictions.
Award: First Prize, SF Art Institute Film Festival
1982, 16mm, color/so, 17m, $50
A poem to my Mother and Grandmother.
1982, 16mm, color/so, 1m, $20
A film about light and aggression, heat and religion; she ascends from the piano.
Exhibition: SF Art Institute Film Festival
1982, 16mm, color/so, 1m, $20
Second in a series of films shot from my apartment windows. The character narrates possible scenarios of neighbors' lives and talks about the mid-Atlantic accent and the threat of war as the windows are washed and people move in and out of their apartments.
Award: SF Art Institute Film Festival
1983, 16mm, color/so, 5m, $30
Filmed in cotton fields and curio shops on the edge of the road in Mississippi. A man reads from a cookbook, "the barbecue is hot enough if you have to pull your hand away before you have finished spelling Mississippi." The film examines received memories and images of racial stereotyping.
1985, 16mm, color/so, 7m, $30
This is a film about the language and perception of love and romance. The film blurs the line between fact and fiction, personal and cultural experience. "She found that the truth didn't sound real. She did research. She went through the magazines. She found that there existed a magazine kind of love that had a vocabulary of about twelve words. She found that if she rearranged these twelve words around different names and places that she could make a story."
Award: Second Place, Onion City Film Festival
Exhibition: London, Oberhausen, and Athens film festivals.
1987, 16mm, color/so, 20m, $60
A meditation on the female body in culture. Screening requires blowing bubbles in the path of the projector light.
1990, 16mm, b&w/sound on cassette tape, 3m, $20
The film portrays three people through their living room environments. These portraits push domestic order to the edge of collapse and loneliness. Only the telephone remains as a common link to the outside world, as the home becomes both sanctuary and prison. Using the wide angle properties of film and the close-up properties of video, the film explores the temporal and spatial relationship between the mediums of film and video. A film about loss.
"THREE DOMESTIC INTERIORS can be seen as a rethinking of portraiture. Three people, a young woman, an older woman and a young man are portrayed in their respective living rooms. The filmed portraits reveal still lives. Alone amid their possessions, they are isolated from any larger social context. Their connection to the outside world is through sounds that seep into their domestic space, from the street, the neighbors and via the telephone." - Kathy Geritz, Pacific Film Archive
1992-1993, 16mm, color/so, 37m, $110