Leslie Thornton

Southfirst is proud to present Leslie Thornton: Of Necessity I Become an Instrument—Works Drawn from the “Long ‘70s.” The exhibition includes four rarely-seen Super 8 and 16mm films made between 1974-1981, alongside an installation of paintings, drawings, notes and photographs drawn from the artist’s personal collection, and spatial interventions created by Thornton for the gallery. Among these works are unpublished notes and letters written by Thornton while studying at SUNY Buffalo, paintings by Thornton, as well as drawings and paintings by her father and grandfather. Together the pieces on view, many exhibited for the first time, explore Thornton’s developing aesthetic as a painter and avant-garde filmmaker.

“Of Necessity I Become an Instrument” includes artifacts drawn from Thornton’s archive that present a personal, historical and intellectual context from which her work develops. Of significance is her father and grandfather’s involvement with the Manhattan Project and her own youth in the Cold War era. Thornton studied painting at SUNY Buffalo, where she worked closely with Paul Sharits and Hollis Frampton through the Department of Media Study. There, she encountered the films of Yvonne Rainer, Jack Smith and Andy Warhol. She started making films in 1974, beginning with Face. All of Thornton’s early works, including X-TRACTS (1975, 16mm) were shot and edited using diagrammatic, gridded scores as a point of departure; some of these documents are on display. Of All Right You Guys (1976, 16mm), she writes: “was comprised of a series of the same questions asked of two different women...I had a pre-determined score, like a musical score, for how I would edit the footage, ignoring the content of their answers for the most part. The result was difficult to watch because it was non-linear, and unfamiliar formally, but you did get a strong sense about these women and how they framed each other.” Though these works parallel practices of structuralist filmmakers, all four early films focus on the representation of women, in which structural film’s semiotic precepts intersect with the construction of gender identity. These films also anticipate later generations’ interest in appropriated imagery and the critique of popular culture and official histories.

Leslie Thornton (b. 1951, Oak Ridge, Tennessee) is an artist engaged with film, video, photography and installation. Peggy and Fred in Hell (1983-2015) is widely considered a landmark of avant-garde cinema. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2013. Thornton’s early film work is currently being archivally restored through the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, the Pacific Film Archive, and other institutional and private sources. She recently completed They Were Just People (2016), a commission for the Walker Art Center made in response to the work of Bruce Conner. Her collaboration with James Richards, Crossing, will premiere in London in October. She is a professor in the Modern Culture and Media department at Brown University and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.