Between 1995 and 2011, Jeff Preiss shot 2500 rolls of 16mm film using the conventions of home movies, while also imposing rules and techniques he honed as an influential cinematographer. With rigorous editing and maintaining an in-camera chronology, the resulting film was STOP.

STOP cycles through an array of subjects – quotidian family life, the founding and three-year program of Orchard gallery, a study of architectural cinematography commissioned by Rem Koolhaas, the shocked atmosphere of New York City after September 11. Preiss precisely divides sequences of imagery into four half-hour programs, each punctuated by the film material's lab roll numbers to form an index.

In balancing the personal and the structural, Preiss comments, "the central subject is still my child." We see Isaac Preiss growing over 16 years, in everyday scenes of youth while entering the space of his interior world, and along the way, witnessing the issues surrounding a transformation of gender expression.

This screening extends the themes of childhood and transformation explored in Tolia Astakhishvili's exhibition Figure of the Child.

Program

Jeff Preiss, STOP, 1995-2012, 120 min

Introduction and conversation with Jeff Preiss and Saim Demircan.

Jeff Preiss is a New York-based filmmaker, cinematographer, and visual artist active since the 1980s. A founding member of the experimental gallery Orchard and former co-director of Films Charas, Preiss’ work spans narrative and experimental cinema, with films preserved by Anthology Film Archives and the Andy Warhol Foundation. His projects have been shown internationally at venues including ICA, London and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and have involved collaborations with artists such as Joan Jonas, Andrea Fraser, Josiah McElheny, and Anthony McCall. He was Director of Photography for Bruce Weber’s ‘Let’s Get Lost’ (1989), and his 2014 feature Low Down won the Sundance Cinematography Award. Currently on the board of Light Industry, his film ‘The Secret World’ (2023), made in collaboration with the artist Josiah McElheny, was screened at MoMA in 2024.

Saim Demircan is a curator and writer. He is currently a PhD candidate at Kingston School of Art and Artistic Director of INCURVA in Trapani, Sicily. Demircan was the 2017 recipient of the Goethe Institut New York’s curatorial residency program, Ludlow 38 in New York City, and between 2012 and 2015, a curator at Kunstverein München in Munich, Germany. Previously, he curated a two-year program of off-site projects at Focal Point Gallery in Southend-on-Sea as well as an exhibition of work by Kai Althoff. He recently organised an exhibition of Jeff Preiss' 'Orchard Documents' at Cell Project Space in London.