Doors at 7, event starts at 7:30
Admission $18
May 22, 2025, 7pm
e-flux is pleased to present a collaborative screening and live performance by Jeff Preiss and Anthony McCall. The evening opens with the premiere of Beckoning Cats (2025), a new film by Preiss created specifically for this occasion, and continues with a reimagined performance that revisits a collaborative work originally presented during the final exhibition at the experimental gallery Orchard in 2008.
The program features the eighth iteration of Anthony McCall’s Five Minute Drawing, first performed in 1974. McCall’s precisely choreographed live drawing unfolds alongside Preiss’s real-time documentary projection—an orchestration of filmed gestures and reworked imagery drawn from their earlier collaboration at Orchard. Together, the artists construct a layered temporal structure in which past and present are superimposed, expanding the documentary mode into a poetics of re-staging. The performance also draws upon the screen and sequence configurations from Preiss’s 2002 collaboration with Joan Jonas, Montage Vérité, originally curated by Karin Schneider for TRANS>area.
The program also marks the premiere of Preiss’s Beckoning Cats, a ten-minute 16mm-to-digital work made in homage to Chris Marker. The film reflects on an anonymous shrine discovered outside Light Industry in Brooklyn on August 26, 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 welcome into a meditation on aviation, cinema, and apocalyptic time ruptures.
Jeff Preiss is a filmmaker, cinematographer, and visual artist active since the 1980s. A founding member of the experimental gallery Orchard and former co-director of Films Charas, Preiss’s work spans narrative and experimental cinema, with films preserved by Anthology Film Archives and the Andy Warhol Foundation. His projects have been shown internationally at venues including MoMA and the Stedelijk Museum, and have involved collaborations with artists such as Joan Jonas, Andrea Fraser, Josiah McElheny, and Anthony McCall. He was Director of Photography for Bruce Weber’s Let’s Get Lost (1989), and his 2014 feature Low Down won the Sundance Cinematography Award. Preiss is currently on the board of Light Industry and in pre-production on a joint US/German/Polish feature.
Anthony McCall is a New York-based artist known for his iconic “solid light” works, which occupy a space between sculpture, cinema, and drawing. Emerging from the avant-garde film scene of the 1970s, his seminal film Line Describing a Cone (1973) established a foundational approach to expanded cinema. McCall’s practice engages with architectural space, duration, and audience perception, often using haze, projection, and minimal geometry to create immersive environments. His work has been exhibited widely at institutions including Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Hamburger Bahnhof, and MoMA. In addition to his solo practice, McCall has collaborated with artists such as Jeff Preiss and David Grubbs, extending his inquiry into performance and spatial drawing.
This program is curated by Sanna Almajedi, Performance Curator at e-flux, and Lukas Brasiskis, Film & Video Curator at e-flux.
For more information, please contact program [at] e-flux.com.
Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator (entrance at 180 Classon Ave, through a garage door) leading into the e-flux office space. A ramp is available for the steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom, with no steps between the event space and the bathroom.