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Buildings and Grounds/ The Angst Archive

Ken Kobland

2003 00:45:00 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:3Video

Description

"...a rumination, a series of borrowed 'dialogues' out of an ongoing argument with myself. It meanders, mentally and physically, reflecting on the conditions of being human; on transience, consciousness and desire. It uses landscapes as provocations, as sites of contemplation. And between the landscape and the thought, i.e. between the radical presence of the physical world and the idea, there is, more often than not, a distance, disbelief or irony."

–– Ken Kobland

"A film about placelessness and Kobland's response to it--to throw the net of his soul wide, wider, over everything. Always two steps ahead of the viewer, the filmmaker weaves together images and sounds that didn't seem to belong together before, resulting in a sprawling work that is part confession, part provocation and part meditation on technology, consumption and spiritual death."

–– Isaac Mathes, CinemaTexas (2003) 

About Ken Kobland

Ken Kobland has been working in various aspects of film and video since 1971, creating productions in collaboration with performing artists such as Philip Glass, the Wooster Group, Elizabeth LeCompte, and Spalding Gray. His work explores a variety of themes and issues, often embracing a photographic aesthetic within the context of video. Beautifully edited, his work merges diaristic and documentary categories, presenting an art of video that approximates photo-journalism. He is a recipient of the 1986 Berlin Artist in Residence Fellowship (DAAD) and has received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.