Cell Project Space

A special screening of Jeff Preiss's latest films, including his second collaboration with Josiah McElheny, will be followed by a Q&A between Preiss and Dr. Dan Kidner. The event is in conjunction with Jeff Preiss's exhibition Orchard Documents at Cell Project Space.

 

While Preiss has worked as a prolific director and cinematographer, his practice as an experimental filmmaker has also been instrumental in the crossover between art and film in New York City since the 1980s.

 

Jeff Preiss, 2025, 12 min

 

A short 16mm-to-digital work made in homage to Chris Marker. The film reflects on an anonymous shrine discovered outside Light Industry – the Brooklyn-based microcinema in Brooklyn – on 26th August 2016, twenty-eight days after Marker’s death. Featuring twenty Maneki-Neko figurines, a recurring motif in Marker’s oeuvre, Preiss uses these folklore icons as a visual foundation, moving from their mechanical gestures of hospitality into a meditation on aviation, and cinema.

 

An experimental portrait of New York gallerist and publisher Christine Burgin, traced through her Borgesian library of strange and visionary books by such eclectic figures as Dinshah Ghadiali, Eva Carrière, Charles Fort, Richard Shaver, and Wilhelm Reich. Seen through 16mm film, VHS tape, and 35mm slide sources – as well as the full spectrum of visible colour – The Secret World invites us into a self-contained universe of mystical and crackpot imaginings, as Burgin’s lifelong friends, the “documentarians” Preiss and McElheny, leaf through disparate images of lost Atlantis supposedly found in a rock, perpetual-motion machines, and ectoplasm manifested in historic performances.

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Please contact ​Alexandra Diamond-Rivlin: gallery {at} cellprojects.org for all press and access related inquiries.