Luther Price

Since the 1980s, Luther Price has produced a prolific body of films, performances, and slides defined by a distinct vocabulary drawn from autobiography, visceral imagery, and religious iconography. In the last fifteen years he has turned to the manipulation of found film footage, testing the limits of this increasingly obsolete medium by painting, corroding, scratching, and even burying celluloid.
Price began making slides as a means of obtaining "stills" from his unique handmade films. By collaging fragments of B movies, discarded Hollywood trailers, or anonymous home movies in projected compositions, Price personalizes these lost images. Sorry consists of eighty handmade slides created over seven years; the work ruminates on mortality and selfhood, pairing remnants of a found film from the 1940s about Jesus and the Crucifixion with banal images of a suburban family, combined with desiccated insects, hair, leaves, ink, and layers of tape. The slide format allows Price to project these raw materials, provoking questions about the obsolescence of analog photographic technologies.