This exhibition of work by film and video pioneer Gunvor Nelson spans four decades and offers a rare opportunity to experience the accumulated impact of Nelson's artistic vision. Her poetically expansive life's work-created in both San Francisco, her home and workplace for over thirty years, and her native Sweden, where she has resettled-has consistently, often courageously, privileged her subjective gaze and individual experience. Nelson relentlessly refuses predictability (and succeeds) in her search for a true relation between project and form. Among the most experimental of artists, Nelson illuminates such elusive and intimate subjects as childhood, aging, displacement, memory, women's roles, death, and the symbolic forces of nature and water via a potent exploration of the possibilities of sound and moving image. Her ephemeral, dreamlike images are simultaneously tactile and almost tangible, while her imaginative use of language and traces of music add considerably to the emotional impact of her works. Filmic collage and dynamic editing create tension and contrast. The unique characteristics of Nelson's works form less a definable style than a sustained aesthetic.

Organized by Jytte Jensen, Curator, Department of Film.

Program 1
My Name Is Oona. 1969. Looped sound, elliptical cutting, slow motion, and superimpositions construct a dream world in which Nelson's daughter plays, at one with nature. The intensely lyrical images portray a mythological childhood. 10 min.
Red Shift. 1984. Also titled All Expectation, Red Shift is a meditation on the emotional relationships between three generations of women, explored via daily gestures, everyday events, and disjunctive aural traces. Set in the filmmaker's childhood home in Sweden, the film, made with the assistance of Diane Kitchen, is interwoven with voice-over readings of Calamity Jane's letters to her daughter. 50 min.
Time Being. 1991. A delicate and silent portrait of Nelson's mother. Time and refracted light implicate their relationship. 8 min. Program 68 min.
Friday, October 20, 8:00. T2

Program 2
Tree-Line. 1998. Travel that only appears to be moving, a kind of repetitious stammering with complex variations in rhyme and locomotion-the image finally arrives, full frame, at a tree. 8 min.
True to Life. 2006. A close-up journey into plants-a confrontation. 38 min. Premiere.
Light Years. 1987. Another journey, and a confrontation of distance and abrupt closeness, Light Years is a blend of collage animation and highly textured live action that evokes Nelson's displacement from her native culture. 28 min. Program 74 min.
Saturday, October 21, 4:00. T2

Program 3
My Name Is Oona. (See Program 1)
Moons Pool. 1973. Photographed underwater, bodies and landscapes are intercut in a lyrical search for identity and self. 15 min.
Schmeerguntz. 1966. With Nelson Wiley, Dorothy Wiley. With humor and energized anger, idealized images of advertising models and women at beauty pageants-crudely photographed off of the television screen-are contrasted via montage with the "hidden" everyday lives of ordinary women: a pregnant woman trying to get into her underwear, dirty dishes in the sink, the wiping of a baby's rear, and the use of sanitary napkins. A raw and effective debunking of the cherished American myths of "Home and Motherhood." 15 min.
Take Off. 1972. With Ellion Ness. "A metaphysical striptease" (Nelson). 10 min.
Fog Pumas. 1967. With Nelson Wiley, Dorothy Wiley. A surreal fantasy populated by an imaginative blend of people, places, creatures, and events. 25 min. Program 75 min.
Saturday, October 21, 6:00. T2

Program 4
Trace Elements. 2003. A "sound video" highlighting the act of shooting based on the idea that the active, ever-searching camera never quite finds its target. 10 min.
Tree-Line. (See Program 2)
Snowdrift. 2001. (Also known as Snowstorm.) Sudden changes in composition, background, density, color, and contrast interrupt the perpetual flow of snowflakes, floating, whirling, and dancing in constant restlessness. 9 min.
Frame Line. 1983. A brilliant collage of visual and aural elements in which people, gestures, flags, and the city of Stockholm itself come together to reshape memory. 22 min.
Field Study #2. 1988. Animation using cutouts, found footage, and pouring sand. 8 min.
Natural Features. 1990. "A free associative and playfully bizarre form of animation. The fifth film in a series of collage films I call Field Studies. Here I used cutouts, photographs, mirrors, water, toys, paint, ink.in many different combinations. The central theme is face. A dark delicacy lingers." (Nelson). 30 min. Program 78 min.
Sunday, October 22, 4:00. T2

Program 5
True to Life. (See Program 2)
Before Need Redressed. 1994. With Nelson Wiley, Dorothy Wiley. A reworking of Before Need (1979), a complex and rich exploration of time and the layers of memory, death, and language. 42 min. Program 80 min.
Sunday, October 22, 5:45. T2

Program 6
Field Study #2. (See Program 4)
Light Years Expanding. 1988. An extension of the visual ideas and themes of Light Years (Program 2). "[T]he distance of time makes home further, the intensity of memory makes it richer" (Parabola). 25 min.
Trace Elements. (See Program 4)
Snowdrift. (See Program 4)
New Evidence. 2006. A new work created by reworking and condensing combined material from four videos used in the installation Collected Evidence: 52 Weeks. 22 min. Premiere. Program 74 min.
Monday, October 23, 6:00. T2

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