Comfort Film Presents
James Fotopoulos
“Timon” (2020)
Fotopoulos’ 52-minute feature centers around Timon of Athens — the legendary misanthrope and subject of several literary works — who lived around 400 B.C. Similar to other, earlier loose film adaptions by the artist including “Christabel” (2001) and “Alice in Wonderland” (2010), Fotopoulos considers the fractured nature of the sources, such as the disputed authorship and possible incompleteness of the eponymous Shakespeare play, as offering wider avenues for exploration into the soul of the main character.
For the video, made in 2020 during the pandemic lockdown, the actors recorded themselves with their own camera following Fotopoulos’ indications, testing the ways in which independent cinema readjusts itself and its usual practices in order to survive in times of little human contact. The scenes were then reedited and repositioned against backgrounds composed with handmade drawings by the artist, and interrupted by additional original video footage.
Through early cinema artifices, flicker, sudden shifts from positive to negative, minimalism and deconstruction, the characters appear as though suspended in dream or thought, or stuck in a faulty selfie.
Also a collection of shorts featuring
Beauty and the Beast (2019) 13min
Domain (2019) 14sec
Reflection (2020) 18sec
Orestes (2020) 5min
The Lament (2021) 3min
At the Present Time (2021) 1min 27sec
The Otherworld (2021) 1min 41sec
Faustus (20213min 56sec
Parade (2021) 2min 53sec
Media: Digital Projection
Runtime: 68 mins
Free
Screening is indoors
Mask are required.
About James Fotopoulos
James Fotopoulos is an artist working primarily with the mediums of moving image, sculpture, and drawing. Among his many notable film and video works, which range from several seconds to over seven hours are Zero (1997), his first feature which debuted when Fotopoulos was just 20, Migrating Forms (1999), Christabel (2001), Jerusalem (2003-2004), The Sky Song (2007), Alice in Wonderland (2010), Dignity (2012), and There (2014). His works have screened and exhibited in the US and abroad including at MoMA P.S.1, Walker Art Center, Whitney Biennial, Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Arts and Design, Andy Warhol Museum, Sundance Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, London Film Festival, Festival del Film Locarno, Museo de Art Contemportaneo del Zulia, Venezuela, Biennial for Videoart, Mechelen, Belgium, among others. His work has been discussed in Artforum, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Hyperallergic, The New York Post, and others. He is a recipient of a Creative Capital Foundation Grant. James Fotopoulos was born in Chicago, IL in 1976 and currently lives and works in New York.
Programmed for Comfort Station by Raul Benitez, Emily Perez, and Mathew Tapey.