10,000 Shards of Bliss

March 22-25 · UT Downtown Gallery

Thursday, March 22: 2:00 P.M. – 6:00 P.M.
Friday, March 23: 11:00 A.M. – 8:00 P.M.
Saturday, March 24: 10:00 A.M. – 4:00 P.M.
Sunday, March 25: 1:00 P.M. – 5:00 P.M.

10,000 Shards of Bliss 
(the rhythm that forgets itself)
A Rotating Selection of Films by Lewis Klahr

“Above all, Klahr’s great subject is time, which certainly explains the exquisitely melancholy tone that pervades his work. He traffics in modes that are pitched just beyond the realm of reason. Somewhere between waking and sleeping, we can find that wavelength and achieve understanding– only to have it slip away as we enter one state or the other. Klahr’s films and videos provide a rare opportunity for us to engage with a liminal state of consciousness with our alert mind and to reach those “infrathin” moments that Proust describes as existing outside of time.” — Chris Stults, Assistant Curator Film/Video Wexner Center for the Arts from “Collective Unconscious,” an article in Film Comment, May/June 2010

For his film installation at The University of Tennessee Knoxville’s Downtown Gallery, in conjunction with the 2018 Big Ears Festival, Los Angeles based collage film artist Lewis Klahr will present a looped, rotating selection of his films that explore the vicissitudes of time and memory. Many of the films included will be from his ongoing, open-ended series of digital films Prolix Satori. Also included will be a special sequence assembled to be screened only under the following weather conditions — severe overcast or rain lasting at least 60 minutes.

About the Artist

Lewis Klahr uses found images and sound to explore the intersection of memory and history. He is primarily known for his uniquely idiosyncratic films, which he began creating in 1977 and has screened extensively in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Lewis Klahr teaches in the Theater School of the California Institute of the Arts and is represented by The Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London.

Lewis Klahr is currently at work on a new feature length series of collage films titled Circumstantial Pleasures and Porcelain Gods, a retelling of Jean Luc Godard’s 1963 film Contempt as a collage novel.