Post-Revolutionary Selections from the Powel House Moving Image Archive, 1888-2089
This is Description text.
2010, HD video installation with sound
…To be perfectly straightforward: the Powel House has no moving image archive, and the state of this archive in 2089 is obviously still to be determined. Yet by using this museological structure as a critical lens, Hironaka and Suib productively complicate the role the site is asked to play. Presented as a quasi-futuristic meta-museum, the exhibition repositions the structure as a site of multiple possibilities, and both plausible and implausible visions. The exhibition takes as its ostensible starting point 1888, the year in which inventor Louis Le Prince created Roundhay Garden Scene–the oldest surviving motion picture. Beginning with a touchstone moment in cinematic history and extrapolating into the unknown future of 2089, the four videos in the exhibition–each in a different room–act as skewed mirrors of the products of historical interpretation.
-Robert Wuilfe, curator
Powel House Garden Scene
…The exhibition takes as its ostensible starting point 1888, the year in which the inventor Louis Le Prince created Roundhay Garden Scene–the oldest surviving motion picture. Beginning with this touchstone moment in cinematic history and extrapolating in the unknown future of 2089, the four videos in the exhibition–each in a different room–act as skewed mirrors of the products of historical interpretation.
…Located in the front room of the first floor, this video takes its name from Le Prince’s film, but through special effects imagines what the house would be like if the garden and nature overwhelmed the architecture.
-Robert Wuilfe, curator
A Pigeon’s History of The United States
In the dining room, the reclaiming of the site by the non-human continues, in a video whose title is a play on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Both of the first floor works have strong echoes of the real history of the Powel House prior to restoration work beginning in the 1930’s.
-Robert Wuilfe, curator
Minuet (Room On Room Action)
In the second-floor ballroom, Hironaka and Suib move away from images of dereliction, and examine restoration and reproduction. When the Powel House was an industrial site, all the original components of this room were moved to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The house itself now contains a complete reproduction. By combining footage of both sites, Hironaka and Suib playfully conduct a structuralist investigation of authenticity and representation.
Hippy Party
Finally, in the second-floor withdrawing room–an intimate space for conversation that contains silhouettes of 18th century revolutionary radicals Washington and Franklin–Hironaka and Suib look back to the 1960’s to help activate a consideration of dissent and revolt throughout the centuries.
-Robert Wuilfe, curator
By collapsing the time between the American Revolution and 1960’s counterculture movements, Hippy Party further examines America’s conflicted relationship to revolutionary ideologies. Images of long-marginalized counterculture figures (both real and movie-made, including hippies, Yippies, Panthers and American Indian Movement members) are invited into the intimate confines of the Powel House.