A leader of the structural film movement alongside Tony Conrad and Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits’s meticulous composition of his experimental films explored the materiality while investigating the limits of the frame and viewer’s perceptions. His films often used flicker techniques and pure color film frames, and his installations incorporated continuous loops of film and experimental soundtracks fed through multiple projectors, tape players, and other equipment. In N.O.T.H.I.N.G. (1968), Sharits alternates monochromatic frames in a symmetrical structure based on a Buddhist mandala to explore the physical limits of the film and the surface onto which it is projected. The shared sensibility of Sharits and Conrad is evidenced in Conrad’s Paul Sharits: Prescription and Shared Sensibility, a recreation of a lecture on Sharits given by Conrad at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo in 1976 using nine cassette players to explore the dimensions of Paul Sharits’s use of score.

N.O.T.H.I.N.G. (1968), 35 min.
Paul Sharits: Prescription and Shared Sensibility (1976), 30:38 min.

Programming at ICA has been made possible in part by the Emily and Jerry Spiegel Fund to Support Contemporary Culture and Visual Arts and the Lise Spiegel Wilks and Jeffrey Wilks Family Foundation, and by Hilarie L. & Mitchell Morgan.