JAMES FOTOPOULOS

“the mirror mask”

October 8 - November 12, 2022

“ The Mirror Mask ” - James Fotopoulos

9-channel installation

Video - 4:3 - color - stereo 

110min 50sec (total) - loop

2005

@ The Film Gallery - 43 rue du faubourg Saint-Martin 75010 Paris

Opening of the exhibition :

Saturday, October 8, 6pm - 9pm

With the presence of James Fotopoulos

From Saturday October 8 to November 12, The Film Gallery presents The Mirror Mask, a solo exhibition by artist and filmmaker James Fotopoulos featuring video installation, latex sculptures, drawings and digital drawings.

The Mirror Mask was created as a commission for the 2005 Contour Biennial of Video Art is 9 channel installation with drawings.

Working from the Biennial’s theme of feminine power, the video’s exploration uses symbols from both Flemish and Egyptian art reinterpreted through CGI, latex sculptures and low-tech animation programs – the images of the past translated onto a frozen computerized canvas.

Sunday October 16, 5 pm @ Cinéma L’archipel - 17 boulevard de Strasbourg 75010 PARIS

James Fotopoulos’ film “Migrating Forms”

Screening & Artist Talk

As part of the exhibition The Mirror Mask at TFG  we are very pleased to present a screening of James Fotopoulos’ 16mm film “Migrating Forms” (1999)

A film that shocked New York’s film community and beyond at its first showing at Anthology Film Archives in the context of the NY Underground Film Festival in year 2000, “Migrating Forms” is a caustic, decadent, life-non-affirming, visionary feature 16mm film made by a then 23-year-old Fotopoulos as though channeling Baudelaire in portraying a love story à la “Les Fleurs du Mal” reframed within a Chicago urban wasteland.

Fotopoulos, in considering the film today, writes: “Nothing has really changed in how I see it. I made it — and then moved on to the next film — I just put the films out there. When I think of it, I don’t think things have changed in terms of how I do things. I make what I feel, what I see at that time I am making it. And I don’t think anything has changed in what I think about film itself, in all its elements: a shadow world or dream place, that atmosphere, the fantastic… Meanings have to be in front of the camera to be seen.” Fotopoulos in attendance and available for Q&A following the screening.

“...the film that stays with me the most… “Migrating Forms” has a formal purity and obsessive power that’s all too rare these days. It’s not a film you’d ever find at Sundance (Blair Witch is a party by comparison). It alone gives the Underground Film Festival a reason for being.” — Amy Taubin .