Overview

The recent work of Lynn Marie Kirby can be understood as a way of using seemingly transcendent aesthetic forms to achieve a deeper form of immanence…While Kirby is clearly an heir to the legacies of formalist modernism in film and video art, her work moves through this trajectory and back again. Like earlier experimental filmmakers, Kirby employs painterly abstraction, the radical condensation of time, and the direct registration of space on the material substrate of the medium. But she almost always uses formal schemas in order to return to the things themselves. Kirby examines the uniqueness, irreducibility, and the emotional ramifications of the particular moment, locating the palpable residues of the everyday. But like later, more systematic filmmakers such as Gehr, Akerman, and Snow, Kirby attends to the larger patterns, repetitions, and reversals that organize both perception and our lived experience.