David Gatten

 

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DAVID GATTEN – filmmaker, Henry James fan, recent Guggenheim fellow, and aspiring audio book producer – makes bookish films about letters and libraries and lovers and ghosts that are filled with words, some of which you can read. His work has shown around the popular planet Earth in museums, festivals, biennials, galleries, archives, access centers, elementary schools, storefronts, on sides of buildings and once on a barge that was floating down river. Six times his films have played in the New York Film Festival, five times at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, four times at the London Film Festival, three times at the Pacific Film Archive, twice in the Whitney Biennial and once upon a time, for reasons still unclear to everyone involved, at the Kiel International Festival of Archeological Film.

You can find his films in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Art Institute of Chicago but only rarely can he find his glasses.

He lives and works by the water in Red Hook, Brooklyn and on Seabrook Island, South Carolina and teaches 16mm filmmaking/Wallace Stevens appreciation at The Cooper Union in New York City.

 

 

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Over the last ten years David Gatten's films have explored the intersection of the printed word and the moving image, while investigating the shifting vocabularies of experience and representation within intimate spaces and historical documents. Through traditional research methods (reading old books) and non-traditional film processes (boiling old books), the films trace the contours of both private lives and public histories, combining elements of philosophy, biography and poetry with experiments in cinematic forms and narrative structures.

When he is not distracted by driftwood and lead fishing weights, Gatten is at work on a series of nine films about letters, lovers, books, ghosts and the Byrd family of Virginia during the early 18th century. In 2005 he was awarded a Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation to continue his work on the film series, SECRET HISTORY OF THE DIVIDING LINE, A TRUE ACCOUNT IN NINE PARTS. The first four films of the Byrd project were featured in “Views from the Avant Garde” at the 43rd New York Film Festival in Fall of 2005. Portions of the cycle were included in both the 2002 and 2006 Biennial exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

In addition to the Byrd project, Gatten’s new films from two other series (WHAT THE WATER SAID and FILMS FOR INVISIBLE INK) have screened recently at various festivals and in exhibitions in New York, Portland, Chicago, Philadelphia, Windsor, Rotterdam, Berlin, London, Leeds, Brighton, Glasgow and Bangalore.

A ten-year long project documenting the underwater dramas just off Seabrook Island, South Carolina, WHAT THE WATER SAID, NOS. 1-3 (1997-1998) and WHAT THE WATER SAID, NOS. 4-6 (2006), are films in which both the sounds and images are the result of the oceanic inscriptions written directly into the emulsion of the film strips as they were buffeted by the salt water, sand and rocks; as they were tasted and chewed by curious sea creatures.

In the FILMS FOR INVISBLE INK series there is almost nothing at all to look at. Or read. Or listen to. Well, occasionally a rectangle. Maybe some paper fiber. Dust. A bit of Charles Darwin. Maybe a line of Blanchot. But that’s about it.

On the other hand, CLEARCHANNEL, a gallery-based series of collaborative events and works in plastic, water and VHS videotape, created and staged with the indomitable Jessie Stead, took place at the WORK Gallery in Brooklyn in the Fall of 2007 and there was a ton of stuff to look at, listen to and play with. Their collaborative Super8/16mm/digital opus TODAY! has been filmed around the globe-shaped globe and the resulting results of the episodic episodes have been screened at screenings in London, Brighton, Bangalore, Rotterdam and New York City.

Previously, Gatten’s work has been exhibited at museums, galleries and cinémathèques including “The American Century” at the Whitney Museum, Pacific Film Archive, First Person Cinema, San Francisco Cinémathèque, Art Gallery of Ontario, Cinémathèque Française, BFI, P.S. 1, Anthology Film Archives, Cinema Project, Swiss Institute, Helsinki Film Co-Op, Museum of Contemporary Cinema in Lisbon, Image Forum in Japan, Art Institute of Chicago, Proteus Gowanus, Issue Project Room, NBK Gallery, Exit Art, Permanent Gallery, Ballroom Marfa, DC Arts Center, St. Mark’s Poetry Project, Millennium Film Workshop, Chicago Filmmakers, Double Negative and the Yokohama Museum of Art.

The films have been screened at many festivals as well, including Rotterdam, New York, London, Ann Arbor, Toronto, Seattle, Portland, Onion City, Ottawa, Athens, Lisbon, Tokyo, Seoul, Bangkok, Impakt, Media City, TIE, Cinematexas, THAW, Chicago Underground, Kill Your Timid Notion, PDX, Images, FLEX, and Black Maria.

Gatten was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1971. Shortly thereafter his family moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, where he lived for 20 years, slowly learning the meaning of the word “y’all” though never himself attempting to deploy it. Gatten received a BA from the University of North Carolina Greensboro in 1995 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998. A former Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema & Photography at Ithaca College, he confused many Hollywood-bound students with the history & theory of experimental film & international cinema while sharing extension-tube formulas, wine recommendations and coconut rice with those who fell more happily under the sway of Hollis Frampton, Claire Denis, Forough Farrokhzad, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Chris Marker. Gatten currently continues his teaching in the School of Art at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science & Art in the East Village of New York City.

Residing most of the year in a former luggage factory that used to be a can factory, Gatten makes neither, but enjoys both travel and soup. When not at work on his films there, he can often be found reading on the sand at the point where the Edisto River meets the Atlantic Ocean at the southeastern tip of Seabrook Island, South Carolina. He records the movements of the shrimp boats and gratefully eats whatever they catch that day.

All in all, in spite of the muggings, the bike accidents, the scorpion sting and the recent New York City subway fare increase, he feels quite lucky.