Admission Free

Sculptor, filmmaker and video artist Nancy Holt will screen two of her most important tapes, and speak of their relationship to the rest of her work.

Underscan
“Underscan, produced with Carlotta Schoolman, uses as a structural framework something particular only to video - the underscanning device on a (studio) monitor that compresses the picture so that the edges can be seen precisely, doing away with the variation that occurs between monitors in the amount of the picture that can be seen.... Holt uses this framework in displaying photographs of her Aunt Ethel's home in New Bedford, Massachusetts, as she reads excerpts from letters to her from her aunt which date from 1962 to 1972. Most of the photographs are seen three times as they are transformed through underscanning.... The abstract nature of Underscan counterpoints the intimacy of the content, incidents in Aunt Ethel's life. The values and strengths of New England come through: a feeling of her aunt's fortitude, self-reliance, sense of humor, and religious conviction, emerge from the incidents that Holt reads in an unemphatic voice. Sickness, broken bones, accidents, deaths, the decay of her own house, preparations for her own funeral, pleasure in the garden, are related to the photographs of the clapboard house and the inside rooms reveal aspects of Aunt Ethel's daily existence.”
-Castelli-Sonnabend Videotapes and Films, 1975

• By Nancy Holt. Produced with Carlotta Schoolman. (1974, 8 mins)