Dawn Surf Jellybowl Filmstrip 2

Dawn Surf Jellybowl Filmstrip 2 is one of a series of works made from filmmaker Jennifer West’s negatives and prints, which each represent (or as she puts it, ‘picture’) a half-second of moving film. The strips hang on the wall and spill onto the floor, suggesting the passage of film through a projector and the eventual wastage of much of it on the proverbial cutting-room floor – indeed, that’s often where she finds it. West uses offbeat products to process her films: coal-tar dye, eyeliner, whiskey, hot sauce, urine, deodorant, aphrodisiacs, skateboard wheels. And she likes to finish them in equally unconventional ways – they are ‘rubbed with Jimson Weed Trumpet flowers, or dripped and splattered with nail polish, or sprayed with Lavender Mist air freshener.’ Or why not all three? The resulting solar flares, looping spattered marks and tropic blaze and haze of Dawn Surf Jellybowl Filmstrip 2 combine to accentuate the surfer’s rhythmic, surging motion, creating a kaleidoscopic wave of synthesised subject and medium. West explains her approach as a product of Pacific Northwest art of the ’90s, and hastens to add that ‘it’s more DIY than Heroic Sublime.’ But she also feels very much part of a tradition of visceral film-making and painting, citing Tony Conrad’s electrocuting and pickling of film, Carolee Schneemann’s emulsion handworking, Ed Ruscha’s beet juice and Pepto-Bismol paintings, and Stan Brakhage spitting on and scratching his negatives with his fingernails.