Born in the mid-70s in the Midwest, Andrew Lampert primarily produces films, videos and live performances. Over the last decade his works have been widely exhibited at festivals (NY Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Kill Your Timid Notion), in cinemas (BFI, Light Industry), in galleries (Mitchell Algus Gallery, NYC & Associates, London), performance venues (The Kitchen, NYC & The Center for Contemporary Art, Glasgow), museums (The Getty Museum, Los Angeles & The Whitney Museum of American Art) and elsewhere. Lampert lives in Brooklyn, works as Archivist at Anthology Film Archives and is researching the seamy underbelly of the music industry for a theatrical production.
I enjoy going to the big movie multiplexes and noting their mistakes. Perfect misframing after a bad splice, the long minutes it takes for the popcorn boy to amble from the floor to the booth so that he can adjust the image. Soft focus and booming sound, or the complete lack thereof. Delinquent reels projected out of order, sometimes discernible tho far better when sublime confusion fashions new narratives and non-linear relationships. Space and time. The time it takes to fix a mistake and the physical space occupied between the projector, the projectionist, the audience and the screen. This is cinematic.
Which is to say the projector and the screen and the projectionist and the audience are together far more integral to cinema than any film running through a projector in a booth behind the audience, operated by a projectionist who beams light above heads and onto the screen. What we watch in the cinema, you can call it content, is interchangeable. Movies eventually resemble movies, some singular while most remembered as being this genre or that, starring or made by someone, so and so meets so and so. Celluloid is not cinema, not even close. So what does expanding cinema mean? Bigger audiences? At the multiplex maybe, but for us (if you have read this far you are one of us) expanded indicates multiple projectors, numerous means. Simultaneity and synchronicity, or the complete lack there of. Space and time. [A.L.]
Curated by Henry Hills.
(Free for FAMU students.)
