Margaret Honda, Double Feature with Short Subject, 2023-2024, polyester gels, sunlight, exhibition space
Film
28 April 2016 — 27 May 2024
Margaret Honda's site-specific Films work with sunlight, existing architecture, and the viewer’s presence to reconfigure standard elements of film projection. Honda is interested in the materials and mechanics of analog motion picture production rather than its capacity for telling stories, and she uses existing structures and environmental conditions as the basis for her interventions. For Film she works with cinema lighting gels, which come in manufactured sets in a range of colors and tones and typically serve to adjust the color temperature of a given scene. Identical in size, the gels function as film frames, and each window frame forms a reel of film. Instead of a projector, the sun provides light while visitors lend motion to the work, frame by frame, as they pass through the space. Moviegoers typically sit still, in the dark, and watch a single film from beginning to end. Here, the viewers are instead in motion, the space itself is full of light, and the films can be viewed more or less at once—forwards or backwards. The full duration of the installation functions as an extended single screening, open-ended and unrepeatable.
Film (Basel Social Club), 2023 11 — 18 June, 2023 More information here. Double Feature with Short Subject, 2023 — 2024 Art Institute of Chicago, USA curated by Matthew Witkovsky 25 May — 9 October, 2024 More information here. Film (Fluentum), 2021 as part of the group exhibition Time Without End, Fluentum, Berlin, DE curated by Dennis Brzek & Junia Thiede 14 September — 11 December, 2021 More information here. Film (Fahrbereitschaft), 2017 — 2018 as part of the exhibition la > x margaret honda, stephen prina, christopher williams 15 September 2017 — 3 March, 2018 More information here. Film (Visitor Welcome Center), 2017 Visitor Welcome Center, Los Angeles, USA 8 — 29 July, 2017 More information here. Film (SpazioA), 2017 as part of the group exhibition Waiting for the Sun at SpazioA, Pistoia, IT curated by Martha Kirszenbaum 13 May — 8 September, 2017 More information here. Film (Kunstlerhaus Bremen), 2016 as part of Margaret Honda – An Answer to 'Sculptures' curated by Tenzing Barshee and Fanny Gonella More information here. Since the late eighties, Margaret Honda (*1961 in San Diego, lives and works in Los Angeles) has developed a practice that is deeply sculptural in nature and in which historicity of objects, autobiography and process all play equal roles as working materials. A reconsideration of production methods and their protocols as well as the basic premise of rearranging things, scale, concepts or functions underlies her entire work regardless of the medium she deploys. Sculpture, photography, drawing and, film, are media through which the artist examines the material basis of her output and interrogates the processes by which objects are made, presented and seen. Margaret Honda's work in sculpture and film has been exhibited at the Chicago Art Institute, Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Drawing Center, New York; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark; ICA Miami; Künstlerhaus Bremen; Triangle France, Marseille, among others. She was included in the 2016 edition of Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum. Her films have screened at festivals and museums including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Cinémathèque française, Paris; Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge, MA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Courtisane festival, Ghent; REDCAT, Los Angeles; Berlin International Film Festival; Toronto International Film Festival; and BFI London Film Festival. Margaret Honda is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow. Her work is held in numerous public collections including Centre national des arts plastiques, France; FRAC Lorraine, Metz, FR; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Long Beach Museum of Art; MoCA, Los Angeles. Download CV. Her first gallery solo exhibition is forthcoming at Galerie Molitor in 2024.
Sources: Overview of Film from Art Institute Chicago, 2023 and narrative bio from An Answer to 'Sculptures', Kunstlerhaus Bremen, 2017