John Menick

My past three months have been mostly consumed with finishing a new video for a show at the CCA Wattis in San Francisco called The Prophets of Deceit. The group exhibition, opening September 12, is curated by Magali Arriola, and is comprised of work having to do with the apocalypse. (Magali was one of the three curators behind The Backroom, a research-based gallery I participated in a few months ago.) My contribution to the show, a video essay titled The Secret Life of Things, concerns “last person on earth” films, a sci-fi sub-genre in which a person wakes up to find he or she is the last person alive in a given city. These kinds of movies have all sorts of variations, including zombie films, anti-nuclear films, amnesiac films, vampire films, etc. The project comes out of a blog entry I wrote several months ago having to do with René Clair’s 1924 silent short, Paris qui dort, which is probably the first naive prototype for the genre. (I see now that the title says “Part I,” I guess the video is part II. ) Right now I’m finishing up the final picture edit and moving on to mixing the sound. More updates in the next few weeks.