Luther Price Number 9 and Number 9 II

Presented in collaboration with the Toronto International Film Festival Future Projections Programme

American artist Luther Price is known primarily for his radical Super-8 experimental films and his recent handmade 16mm found-footage works. However, this year’s Whitney Biennale revealed another extraordinary body of work from Price: his gorgeous glass slides.

While Price’s focus on fleshy deterioration and decay has often been called “Boschian,” his slides are buoyed by their fragility and projection through a near-obsolete analogue slide machine. InNumber 9 and Number 9 II, individual collages of transformed found footage and other detritus are held within the slides, materiality giving way to abstraction as light passes through them. Transcending ideas of cinematic decasia, the mesmerizing mix of reclaimed photographic imagery, inks, paint, and other particles offer soulful expressions of the tactile and the fleeting.

This exhibition contains four rare, wax paper ink blots and two carousels of eighty handmade slides, on continuous view at the CONTACT gallery. Price’s 16mm film Sorry–Horns (12) will be presented alongside older slides in the TIFF Wavelengths programme. – Andréa Picard, Exhibition Curator

Luther Price studied sculpture and media/performing arts at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where he currently teaches. Known since the 1980s for his Super 8 films and performances, Price has recently turned to 16mm film. His work has been shown at a number of institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Light Industry, San Francisco Cinematheque, The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and at the 2012 Whitney Biennale, New York.

Curated by Andréa Picard