Jonas Mekas

Jonas Mekas was invited to the Neiman Center in 2009 to produce a portfolio of images excerpted from Walden (Diaries, Notes, and Sketches) his 1968 experimental film, which chronicles scenes from his daily life as well as additional stills of his beloved New York City. The 21 offset lithographs, To New York With Love, is a sensitive tribute to the city, a gift of poetic reminiscences to its viewers. Mekas’s images - which range from seemingly banal pictures of teens playing in Central Park to Rockefeller Center’s bedazzled Christmas tree -  retain the compositional form of the film strip. Each print depicts three frames of film running vertically to highlight the subject’s subtly changing movements while sprocket holes and voiceprints occupy either side of the image. The voiceprint serves to remind the viewer of the sound once associated with the now static image.  

Mekas (b.1922, Semeniškiai, Lithuania - d. 2019, New York, NY) and his brother were taken by the Nazis in 1944 to a forced labor camp in Elmshorn, Germany. After the war, he studied philosophy at the University of Mainz and relocated to New York City in 1949 with the help of the UN Refugee Organization. Two weeks after his arrival in New York, Meckas bought a Bolex camera and began to record brief moments of his life. He became a leading figure of avant-garde and independent cinema and in 1969 co-founded the Anthology Film Archives on the Lower East Side. The Archive, in its original conception, was a showcase for the Essential Cinema Repertory collection. Its creation was an ambitious attempt to define the art of cinema by means of a selection of films which would screen continuously to encourage the study of the medium's masterworks as art forms rather than disposable entertainment. Mekas’s work was widely exhibited during his lifetime at institutions including the Serpentine Gallery, London in 2011-2012 where he received a comprehensive survey of his moving images, poetry and sound. For more biographical and exhibition information on Jonas Mekas: http://jonasmekasfilms.com/diary/

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