by Chiara Spagnoli Gabardi

Mark Street is an artist, film-maker and professor at Fordham University, who has highly established himself in the cinematic and visual field. Mark graduated from Bard College and the San Francisco Art Institute and has shown his wondrous works in the New York Museum of Modern Art Cineprobe series, at Anthology Film Archives, at the San Francisco Cinematheque, as well as in the most prestigious indie worldwide film festivals, such as Tribeca, Sundance, Rotterdam, New York, London, San Francisco, New York Underground, Sarajevo, Viennale, Ourense, Mill Valley, South by Southwest, and many more.

Recently The Film-Maker’s Cooperative — which is the largest archive and distributor of independent and avant-garde films in the world and dates back to 1961, with more than 5,000 films in its collection — hosted one of Mark Streets screening-installations: Out of Theater and into the Street!

In an effort to add installation and gallery work to the long tradition of theatrical screenings and performance work, the Film Coop became a gallery for a couple of weeks in February 2014, to present the light-box collages and two channel video installation by prodigious Mark Street.

The video installations weld several of Street’s docu-experimental clips and explore the cinematic world through some essay excerpts, through a series of poetic montage sequences that beguile for the artistic expression utilised to convey their message. Just as enticing are his light-box collages, where Mark coalesces original 16mm and 35mm film out-takes with hand-painted slides, that lead you to a long forgotten realm of motion pictures. This exceptional exhibit is a remarkable chance to discover the multifaceted world of the prismatic artist Mark Street.