Leslie Thornton

 
Since the mid-1970s, American avant-garde filmmaker and artist Leslie Thornton (born 1951) has produced an influential body of work in film and video. Thornton's early encounters with experimental, structuralist, and cinéma vérité traditions fueled her iconoclastic take on the moving image and gave shape to her practice of weaving together her own footage and voice with archival film and audio. In part through her forceful and dynamic use of sound, Thornton exposes the limits of language and vision in her works, while acknowledging the ways that language and vision nevertheless remain central to scientific discourse and narrative in general. Her work consistently interrogates modes of representation and the violence of looking, pushing beyond critiques of the gaze to consider biases in perception, or the way voice and sound can undermine an otherwise dominant visual narrative.
 
Leslie Thornton -
2022
English edition
Sternberg Press - Monographs and artists' books
An overview of the influential work of a key figure in experimental film and video.
Leslie Thornton - Divine Drudgery
2021
English edition
Lenz Press
Divine Drudgery is an artist book with collages and artworks by James Richards and Leslie Thornton, and contributions by artists, writers and poets centred around liminality and the aesthetics and politics of the invisible.


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