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Keith Evans lives in Oakland, California and has exhibited across the US and internationally.
Keith Evans, Microfossilogram. Courtesy of the Artist.Cinema has no beginning. It is another dimension, another ecology with myriad faces and imaginal emanations. Paranaturalist cinema is one such emanation. It is expanded in idea and unruly, a mercurial methodology in a Paranaturalist philosophy my collaborators and I have proposed to gain insight and develop experimental and analytical means to learn from observation. My collaborators and I called ourselves silt, to invoke the emergent nature of the celluloid cinema process and the shifting black iris landscapes, including the organic ontologies of sound, video, and signal. After producing many ephemeral short films we found performance installation the appropriate means of delivery. Our Paranaturalist inquiry is allied with the tradition of naturalist observation techniques, alongside a "naturalism," yet held sway by the primacy of agencies of imagination in the landscape. It is alive in the flux of ciphers, signs, and patterns manifest where we turn our attention and put our intentions.
Writing of my cinema activities and influences is like an archeological scramble where subduction reveals lost and forgotten strata as well much overlooked remains missing, Simultaneously looking backwards and forwards, I will frame some notions regarding how I relate to landscape, sound, images and science.
At the core, my interests are holistic and concerned with the ephemeral and interpretive, the continuums of perception and materiality. I want to draw attention to our connection to the earth and make a frottage of the light and motion. I ask myself what is a terracentric science of imaging the earth? Prime movers being the pursuit of the supersensible and the synaesthetic.
Indexical and hermeneutic, the direct filmstrips of shadowgrams and microfossilographs are a stratigraphy of time and creation in my performances and installations. The long-image frameless filmstrips are experienced as both panoramas and a moving panorama.
I found myself on a beach confettied with thousands of dried jellyfish, with little navigation fins. “By the wind sailors” is their name. Using a hand lens to peer, I felt affinities and correspondences in the little tidal arcs and concentricities of their forms suggesting a cinematic apparatus and system. Their forms suggested cinematic apparatuses and systems, like little jellyfish orreries, I captured the unique optical phenomenon by throwing light on them with mirrors and lenses directed into a microvideo camera. The apparatus/system is bound up in its own phenomena and there is no way to separate a single phenomenon and the tools used to study it. When projected on video it appears on a Richter-Brakhage-Belson continuum of personal animation. I dream many devices while walking, usually from alterations of 16mm and 8mm projectors to process objects collected in the field. These fascination devices hearken back to the cinema of the 17th and 18th-century. They elaborate many uncanny vocabularies in their compression-expansion-translation conundrums. In performances I am after the cave-like initiatory experience, to open up myself and the audience to a primal experience.
I maintain a reciprocal, conversational relationship to whatever I am doing. For me, the art-making practice is really just a commitment to collaborating, and an observation of the dynamics of collaboration. I am grateful to have many working relationships with great people including, Mike Meyers, Loren Chasse, Dianne Jones, Dylan Bolles, Robert Schaller, Jim Haynes, as well as my silt partners, Xtian Farrell and Jeff Warrin.
