An Evening with Lewis Klahr

An Evening with Lewis Klahr

MoMA presents the world premiere of Sixty Six (2002–15), a new feature by the award-winning Los Angeles–based artist Lewis Klahr (American, b. 1956). Organized in 12 discrete chapters, Sixty Six is a milestone achievement, the culmination of Klahr’s decades-long work in collage filmmaking. With its complex superimpositions of imagery and music, and its range of tones and textures at once alluringly erotic and forebodingly sinister, the film is a hypnotic dream of 1960 and 1970s Pop. Elliptical tales of sunshine noir and classic Greek mythology are inhabited by comic book super heroes and characters from Portuguese foto romans who wander through midcentury modernist Los Angeles architectural photographs and landscapes from period magazines. Sixty Six is the latest, and perhaps most magisterial, entry in Klahr’s open-ended digital series Prolix Satori, in which the artist mines his vast 30-year archive of collage materials. As the historian Tom Gunning observes, “Klahr’s films generate a blend of melancholy and desire from this interplay of grasping and losing, remembering and forgetting.”