Screening: November 18, 2015 | 6-9PM

"Avant GIF"
In Lily Jue Sheng’s new series titled Avant-GIF, Sheng transforms three graphic animations into a thoughtful homage to female predecessors of experimental film (Marie Menken, Alice Guy-Blaché and Mary Ellen Bute). Sheng creates these works by exporting pirated YouTube clips into Adobe Photoshop, tracing the image using the marquee tool and erasing the film entirely. What remain are the remnants of motion emphasized by Sheng’s inclusion of the blinking selection tool. Traced in white on a black background, the animations take on the ghostly presence of the original film in its most reductive translation to the digital world. The result is a compelling and elegant abstract image that finds a new afterlife in a strange, unmoored online environment.

Screening: November 18th, 2015 | 6-9pm

This screening of recent short video and film work by Lily Jue Sheng, becomes a performative event with live visual and sound manipulation by Sheng and her collaborators. In her larger body of work, Sheng moves fluidly between video and film in an investigation of the moving image using traditional and new technology that often looks to animation and formal abstraction. These works create a dense, multi-sensory experience where abstract imagery is manipulated to respond to and react against a synthetic musical score. With no orienting point to hold on to, the viewer is swept up in an optical narrative constructed by clashing and weaving abstract patterns

Biography
Lily Jue Sheng is a moving image artist working primarily in still motion, collage, and expanded cinema forms. She received her MA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and is currently based in Queens, NY. Her work has exhibited internationally at spaces such as Eyebeam, the MoMA PS1 Print Shop, and Center for Performance Research in New York City; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in Montreal; Centro Cultural de España in Mexico City. In July 2016, she will be an artist-in-residence at the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto.