Solaris: Presented By The Dallas Contemporary
With Solaris, the legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky created a brilliantly original science-fiction epic that challenges our conceptions about love, truth, and humanity itself.
Special screening presented by The Dallas Contemporary with Brian Fridge’s short film View Finder
For nearly three decades, Brian Fridge has used analog cameras to document quotidian items in his small apartment, producing films that evoke arenas at a far grander scale, suggesting out of this world celestial bodies, deep space, swirling black holes, and microcosms — the minuscule cellular realms within our bodies and the secret places of earth. As philosopher Janae Sholtz says of Fridge’s work: “The cosmic is inside us, it is us.”
View Finder is one of seven commissions in the series “In the Path of Totality,” backed by the science and mathematics-dedicated Simons Foundation. This initiative promotes collaboration among an artist, a curator, and a scientist, blending their talents to capture the artistic inspiration derived from the total solar eclipse — an awe-inspiring phenomenon that has fascinated both human imagination and animal experience since the dawn of time. View Finder was researched by Fridge in collaboration with planetary scientist Dr. Mary Urquhart of University of Texas at Dallas, who steers UTD’s own eclipse initiatives, and curated by Dallas Contemporary Deputy Director Lucia Simek, and each element contemplates the lens. This includes the lens of the artist’s camera, the lens of the car window, and the lens of words printed on a page — each serving as a filter through which one experiences and interprets the eclipse.