41st Telluride Film Festival presented by National Film Preserve LTD., proudly announces visual artist Christian Marclay as its 2014 poster artist. Telluride Film Festival’s prestigious annual gathering for film industry insiders, cinema enthusiasts, filmmakers and critics takes place every Labor Day weekend in the picturesque town of Telluride, Colorado. The 41st edition of TFF will run August 29 through September 1, 2014.
Over the past 30 years, Christian Marclay has explored the fusion of fine art and audio cultures, transforming sounds and music into a visible, physical form through performance, collage, sculpture, installation, photography and video. Early examples include the series ‘Recycled Records’ (1980-86); the ‘Body Mix’ series (1991-92); Virtuoso (1999); and ‘Snapshots’, an ongoing, informal series of photographs that depict elements of sound and onomatopoeia that the artist discovers in everyday situations. Over the last decade, Marclay has created ambitious work in a variety of media including the video Guitar Drag (2000); Video Quartet (2002); Crossfire (2007); and most recently The Clock (2010) from thousands of edited fragments, from a vast range of films to create a 24-hour, single-channel video.
Christian Marclay was born in California in 1955, raised in Switzerland and now lives in New York and London. He has exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at LACMA (2011); LEEUM Samsung Museum of Art (2010); Whitney Museum of American Art (2010); Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (2008); Cité de la Musique (2007); Moderna Museet (2006); Barbican Art Gallery (2005); Seattle Art Museum (2004); Tate Modern (2004); UCLA Hammer Museum (2003); and the SFMoMA (2001). Christian Marclay also continues to collaborate with musicians, including recent performances with Steve Beresford, Okkyung Lee, Shelley Hirsch and Otomo Yoshihide. He was awarded the Golden Lion at the 2011 Biennale di Venezia for his video work The Clock.
“I was very pleased to be invited to design the poster for the Telluride film festival,” said Christian Marclay. “I decided to celebrate celluloid at a time when the old analog medium is being replaced by digital technology. I have always been interested in outmoded formats such as vinyl records, cassette tapes, or rotary telephones. I also wanted to show how cinema is an art of collage – fragments are collected and assembled to tell a story. The filmstrip with its sprocket holes and optical sound track is instantly recognized as the universal symbol for film. I wonder what will replace it?”
“We have always been enamored with Christian’s work, particularly The Clock and its concept,” commented Telluride Film Festival executive director Julie Huntsinger. “There is such wealth in cinema’s history and Christian pulls from different elements from the past and assembles them in a wholly new arrangement. The poster is a further exploration of this work. His ideas reflect one the most important goals at TFF, which is to create and sustain an appreciation of the art and history of film.”
Marlcay joins a prestigious list of artists who have shared their talents with Telluride Film Festival. Past poster artists include Dean Tavoularis, Ed Ruscha, John Mansfield, Julian Schnabel, Dottie Attie, Doug and Mike Starn, David Lance Goines, Chuck Jones, David Salle, Alexis Smith, Jim Dine, Seymour Chwast, Frederic Amat, Francesco Clemente, Dave McKean, Gary Larson, Chip Kidd, John Canemaker, Mark Stock, Laurie Anderson, William Wegman, Ralph Eggleston, Maira Kalman and Dave Eggers.