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Watch on the artist's website.
Julie Murray is an Irish born artist, film and video maker living in the US. Drawing on her background in the Fine Arts, she makes short experimental works in digital and film media which are poetical in nature, engaging the textural imprints and limits of the form as an essential element of pictorial content.
The footage that became "If You Stand…" was amassed over time and in fragmentary form was the working material for a series of film loops generated for performances I carried out with filmmaker Caspar Stracke in the mid 1990s in New York City. These performances were a lot of fun. They involved six to eight projectors in and out of which we threaded our film loops as quickly as our sweaty hands could manage. The resulting mayhem generated novel results and occasionally reached moments of hypnotic rhythmic harmony between image and sound which made it all seem worth it.
The sound in of one of the performances we did at a big loft gallery in Soho, NYC, was made by DJ Olive and in another by Ikue More, both great sound artists. We were lucky. After we had finished these performances I found myself with quite a number of film loops composed of fragments of shots that rhymed in a certain tight way and were closed unto themselves needing no justifications of before’s-and-after’s. I had other longer clusters half formed on the bench with developing ideas as to how I might use them and eventually began to assemble all these elements into a single strand. It was going to be one long poem in the form of a single run-on sentence with no breaks, with one image or idea leading into another by rhythm and rhyming metaphor.
The footage of the trellis work of the Queensboro bridge was hand processed and put to the sound of radio static, as if things were coming in and out of sonic focus. It seemed well suited to accompany the picture’s occasional intermittency due to the hand processing. It provided a good “bracket” if you will, for the whole film, setting the viewer up for journey and uncertainty and making a doorway into the run-on montage to follow.
Read more in the interview with Mike Hoolboom.
