From: Stan VanDerBeek & Joan Brigham, “Steam Screens”, 1979 (photo: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1979) – Image courtesy of the Stan VanDerBeek Estate

“Steam Screens” made its first appearance in the Sculpture Garden of the Whitney Museum in December 1979 as the fourth work in a series of collaborations between Stan VanDerBeek and Joan Brigham. In this live multiple projection work curtains of steam rise from a system of metal pipes, reconfigured today by Brigham for the current environment, as “screens” onto which a selection of VanDerBeek’s 16mm films are projected. Audience members are not only viewers, but active participants, displacing steam and intercepting light to become projection surfaces themselves.

“In the steam the film reaches the ultimate point of dematerialization. The audience is able, physically, to enter the image and the cloud and become wrapped in a wholly new experience.” – Joan Brigham, 1979

About “Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016”
This fall, the Whitney Museum of American Art presents Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016, a landmark exhibition that focuses on the ways in which technology has created new forms of immersive experience using the moving image. Artists have dismantled and reassembled the conventions of cinema—screen, projection, darkness—to create new readings of space, optical form, and time. The exhibition will fill the Museum’s 18,000-square-foot Neil Bluhm Family Galleries on the fifth floor, as well as the adjacent Kaufman Gallery, and will include a substantial film program in the Susan and John Hess Family Theater, and a series of expanded cinema events organized by Microscope Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in collaboration with the Whitney. Organized by Chrissie Iles, the Whitney’s Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator.

Lead Underwriting Support Provided by the Robert D. Bielecki Foundation.
Generous Support provided by J.J. Kasper, Paul Jost, and Natasha Reatig.

This presentation is made possible in part with public funds from the New York State Council of the Arts’ Electronic Media & Film Presentation Funds grant program, administered by The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes.

Microscope Gallery Event Series is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).

Additional Support provided by Knockdown Center and Negativland.

Sponsored by Colorlab and The Bodega. Official Media Partner: The Brooklyn Rail.