Please join us on Saturday, May 4, at 6:00 PM at Time & Space Limited in Hudson, NY, for a screening, artist’s talk, and Q&A session with Lothar Osterburg. The event accompanies Osterburg’s site-wide exhibition at Pamela Salisbury Gallery, A Celebration of the Small, a survey show of work spanning over 25 years.
The program will include a selection of videos by Lothar Osterburg and a short film by videographer Walter Hergt offering a window into Osterburg’s creative process. The artist’s film, A Bookmobile For Dreamers will be accompanied by a performance of its original score on Theremin by noted composer and performer Elizabeth Brown.
Osterburg expanded into new media through collaborations with his wife, Elizabeth Brown, beginning in 2003. They developed the multimedia chamber opera A Bookmobile for Dreamers (Lincoln Center, 2013) during a Bogliasco Foundation residency; the dreamlike meditation on books, reading, libraries, culture, and imagination combines live Theremin, recorded soundscape, and Osterburg’s imagery of a bookmobile making its rounds and offering entry into various worlds through books. Brown also wrote music for videos in Osterburg’s later projects Piranesi and Babel, which were presented in conjunction with live performances.
Lothar Osterburg
The Hudson Valley-based, German native Lothar Osterburg (b. 1961) is known as an artist, master printer, and teacher of photogravure. He received his degree from the Art Academy Braunschweig in Germany in printmaking and experimental film in 1989. He received his training as a master printer at Crown Point Press in San Francisco in the early 90’s and has operated his own printshop in New York since 1994.
Awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship (2010), an Academy Award in Art; from the American Academy of Arts and Letters both in 2010, two New York Foundations for the Arts Fellowships, and a 2018 Jordan Schnitzer Award for Excellence in Printmaking. He currently teaches at Bard College, NY.
Working from memory, Osterburg creates small-scale models out of readily available or found material, which he stages to photograph through a macro lens or magnifying glass. The scenes are thus brought to life-size dimensions and printed in the 19th-century photographic process of copperplate photogravure. In 2005, after a 15-year break from filmmaking, Osterburg made his first of 7 collaborative videos with Elizabeth Brown.
Elizabeth Brown
Elizabeth Brown combines a composing career with an extremely diverse performing life, playing flute, shakuhachi, and theremin in a wide variety of musical circles. Her chamber music, shaped by this unique group of instruments and experiences, has been called luminous, dreamlike, and hallucinatory.
As an orchestral musician, Brown has performed as thereminist with the Boston Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, the American Symphony, and the American Composers Orchestra; has played flute with Orpheus, Philharmonia Virtuosi, New York City Ballet Orchestra, American Symphony, and many other NYC orchestras. She appeared across Japan and the U.S. with Trio Getsuro (two shakuhachi and ichigenkin/one-string koto). She premiered her shakuhachi solo Dialect at the World Shakuhachi Festival 2018 in London; her music has also been featured at shakuhachi festivals in Kyoto, Prague, Sydney, and New York City.
Walter Hergt
Walter Hergt is a Hudson Valley-based filmmaker, visual artist, and oral historian who is passionate about making films that create vivid representations of peoples’ lives, particularly those that unsettle our preconceptions and expand our ability to see one another.
Walter has previously worked in print and radio, is a carpenter, a social justice worker, and holds a graduate degree in Political Science from City University New York and a certificate from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.