Jeanne Liotta was born and raised in NYC where she originally studied theatre at NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts before becoming immersed in various collective art and music collaborations during the late 1980s. Since then she has worked mainly in film and other ephemera including video, photography, works on paper and projection performances. Her work has been screened at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The New York Film Festival, The New York Video Festival, KunstFilm Biennale, Cologne ArtFair, The Rotterdam International Film Festival, The Pacific Film Archives, Anthology Film Archives, and The Museum of Modern Art and has been broadcast on The Sundance Channel and PBS Reel New York. She has received grants from The Museum of Contemporary Cinema, The Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, the Experimental Television Center, and. MacDowell Colony Fellow 2002.
Jeanne Liotta is also a curator (Firefly Cinema at the 6th and B Community Garden, and Proteus Gowanus Gallery Library Exhibit). She has taught in various institutions including The Museum School in Boston, The New School University, Pratt Institute in New York, The San Francisco Art Institute, and is on the faculty of the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College, She is a researcher , scholar, and traveling lecturer for The Joseph Cornell Film Collection at Anthology Film Archives.
Program
One Day This May No Longer Exist (performance for 2 projectors)
Eclipse (16mm film)
Muktikara (16mm film)
What Makes Day and Night (16mm film)
Loretta (16mm film)
Observando El Cielo (16mm film)
A SELECTION of MADE and FOUND slim volumes in 16MM and video
on the material subjects of landscape, science, and natural philosophy et al.
Hymns to the void, the stars in their courses, the earth under your feet wobbles and drifts.
Quote by Carl Sagan (2006) loop
What We As Humans Trying Fallibly Forever
DVD loop silent, duration eternal, 2006
A needle found in the media haystack of the mid-20th century.
Eclipse, 2005, 16mm film, sound by BDF
A lunar eclipse event of 11.09.03, documented and translated via the light-sensitive medium of film. In the 4th c BCE Aristotle founded The Lyceum, a school for the study of all natural phenomena pursued without the aid of mathematics, which was considered too perfect for application on this imperfect terrestial sphere.
The Land of Enchantment, 1994
Super 8 Kodachrome home movie, silent
Muktikara, 1999, 16mm, silent
From the Sanskrit, ’gentle gazing brings liberation’, the title is also the name of the particular body of water which is the image-subject of the film. Landscape as ’inscape’; not inertly present but beckoning an active perception; a seeing and a seeing into. "...as if my eye were still growing." -Gerard Manley Hopkins
One Day This May No Longer Exist 2001/2005
16mm double projection performance with colored gels , sound by Sun City Girls Lucretius identified the substratum of everything that exists with homogeneous atoms too small to be perceived. These atoms aggregate by chance to produce the visible world, and by chance they will eventually disperse, demolishing the cosmos as we know it. There are no permanent beings beneath, within or above the heavens. There are no gods, and the universe manifests no final cause.
What Makes Day and Night, 1998, 16mm film, sound by Nino Rota
This 1940’s artifact is coupled with music by Nino Rota to expose the existential skeleton in the closet: our perilous journey on the planet Earth.
Science’s Ten Most Beautiful Experiments:
#2 Galileo’s experiment on falling objects, digital video, 2006
The first real experimentalist was Galileo, who supposedly dropped a feather and a hammer simultaneously from the Leaning Tower of Pisa in order to demonstrate that the two would hit the ground at the same time. Approx. 400 years later that trick still works. (courtesy NASA 1971)
and: #10 Foucault’s Pendulum, digital video, 2006
The California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco houses this particular pendulum, where one can go to watch the Earth spinning, by deduction.
Haiku (for Onizuka), 2007, 16mm film, silent
For Ellsion Shoji Onizuka, fallen astronaut of the Challenger Mission Flight 51-L.
Loretta, 2003, 16mm film, sound by Carlo Altomare
An abstract moving photogram in the form of a woman or an aria, this film was made sans camera, working in the dark by hand and flashlight. Living in time experienced as high drama, dissolving into the infinite. A dialectical manifestation of phenomena in flux, like any other movie.
I love that which dazzles me and then accentuates the darkness within me. -Rene Char
Hephaestus of the Airshaft, 2005, digital video
The god of metallurgy manifests in Manhattan, with the radio on.
Observando El Cielo (2007) 16mm, color & b/w, 19 minutes.
Soundtrack by Peggy Ahwesh.
Seven years of celestial field recordings gathered from the chaos of the cosmos and inscribed onto 16mm film from various locations upon this turning tripod Earth. This work is neither a metaphor nor a symbol, but is feeling towards a fact in the midst of perception, which time flows through. Natural VLF radio recordings of the magnetosphere in action allow the universe to speak for itself.
The Sublime is Now. Amor Fati!
Sutro (2009) 3 minutes, sound by Scanner
Love song to a San Francisco radio tower
Jeanne Liotta was born and raised in New York City where she makes films and other ephemera such as photographs, works on paper and live projection performances. Her last major film project ’Observando El Cielo’ won the 2008 Tiger Award for Short Films for its investigation of the cosmic landscape at a sublime intersection of art, science and natural philosophy. Her works have been represented in the Whitney Biennial, The New York Film Festival, The Rotterdam Film Festival, The Cairo Biennial, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Wexner Center for the Arts, among others. She has been the recipient of awards from The Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, and the Museum of Contemporary Cinema. She also maintains an ongoing scholarship into The Joseph Cornell Film Collection at Anthology Film Archives and is presently on the faculty of both the University of Colorado Boulder and the MFA program at Bard College, NY.
