LEN LYE

Len Lye

Len Lye

Born at the turn of the 20th 100 years in Christchurch, New Zealand, Lye changed succinctly at the Wellington Technical Institute in 1915 and at Canterbury Art College in 1919 before setting sail overseas. Preternaturally for demonstration and worried, he spent a year in the Polynesian isles of Samoa in 1923, where he came over the American filmmaker Robert Flaherty, before being deported to Sydney, Australia, by the New Zealand colonial management for dwelling central an indigenous community. According to Roger Harrick's, “Lye worked as a quarry and construction laborer, a carpenter's mater, a packer, a miner, and a rail layer”, as well as a ranch hand while in Sydney. These occupations, offered over a half-year, supplied Lye the unfastening to more distant soak up his South Pacific data while mirroring upon and evolving his creative concerns and theories. He kept up some cash and spent the next some months finding out Sydney's heritage institutions. Somewhere amidst the city's libraries and repositories Lye broadcast the instrumentalist Jack Elliott, who became a lifelong colleague and occasional collaborator. Elliott subsequent believed and suggested a two piano tally at the premiere of the Lye's first video, Tusalava (1929), and aided with the melodious synchronization of numerous later films.

Now 25 years vintage and concerned for his entrée into the up to designated day art world, Lye “purchased” himself a job on a 22,000-ton steamship called Euripides. Working his way round and up the Ocean as a coal trimmer, he arrives to in London, England, in 1926. Upon building up creative individuals for demonstration the painters Eric Kenning ton, John Aldridge and Nancy Nicholson, the printmaker Julian Trevelyan, and the writers Laura Riding and Robert Graves, Lye's job rapidly took off. “Lye, the assured invader, made a spectacular submission and central a year was brandishing with premier London artists,” Harrick's writes. Backed by the avant-garde decorator Ben Nicholson (also a New Zealander), Lye brandished with London's famed five and Seven Society in January 1927, and was subsequent adopted in London's International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936.

Beginning with A Color Box (1935), which won a Medal of Honor at the 1935 International Cinema Festival in Brussels, and increasing until 1940, Lye fashioned an assemblage of expressive hand-tooled videos, numerous of which brandished procedures seldom glimpsed before in the cinematic medium. Trade Tattoo (1937) repurposes documentary footage that Lye then adorned, animated text, and stenciled patterns on. The one time turned down black-and-white material is therefore changed into a vibrant matrix for multi-layered imagery and polyrhythmic progression. Rainbow Dance (1936), an carrying video for the Post Office Savings Bank, blends prime reside undertaking footage of a silhouetted one-by-one who promenades (Rupert done) with graphic backgrounds and cartoon drawings. “Painted and accepted by Len Lye” and sponsored by Imperial Airways, Color Flight (1938) utilized the appearing Gaspar hue know-how as a fluid template for plane, follower, pointer and bird kinds, bizarre melodies, playful sound/shape conjunctions, and garish batiks of yellow, azure, red and ...