David Gatten

 

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Over the last ten years David Gatten's films have explored the intersection of the printed word and the moving image, while investigating the shifting vocabularies of experience and representation within intimate spaces and historical documents. Through traditional research methods and non-traditional film processes, the films trace the contours of both private lives and public histories, combining elements of philosophy, biography and poetry with experiments in cinematic forms and narrative structures. Currently Gatten is at work on a series of nine films about letters, lovers, books, ghosts and the Byrd family of Virginia during the early 18th century.

In 2005 he was awarded a Fellowship from Guggenheim Foundation to continue his work on the SECRET HISTORY OF THE DIVIDING LINE, A TRUE ACCOUNT IN NINE PARTS film series.

The first four films of the Byrd project were featured in “Views from the Avant Garde” at the 43rd New York Film Festival in Fall of 2005. In the Spring of last year Gatten’s latest work from the cycle was included in the 2006 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

In addition to the Byrd project, Gatten’s new films from two other series (WHAT THE WATER SAID and FILMS FOR INVISIBLE INK) have screened recently at various festivals and in exhibitions in New York, Portland, Chicago, Philadelphia, Windsor, Rotterdam, Scotland and England.

A gallery-based series of collaborative works and events created and staged with the visual artist Jessie Stead will open at Work in Red Hook, Brooklyn in late September of 2007.

In the Fall of 2007 five of Gatten’s recent films, including two new works, will screen at the Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, the London Film Festival and The International Cinema Exposition in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Previously, Gatten’s work has been exhibited at museums, galleries and cinémathèques including the 2002 Biennial and “The American Century” at the Whitney Museum, Pacific Film Archive, Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Cinémathèque, Art Gallery of Ontario, Cinémathèque Française, Helsinki Film Co-Op, Museum of Contemporary Cinema in Lisbon, Swiss Institute, Issue Project Room, Exit Art, St. Mark’s Poetry Project, Millennium Film Workshop, First Person Cinema, Anthology Film Archives, Cinema Project and Chicago Filmmakers.

His films have been screened at festivals around the world including Rotterdam, New York, London, Ann Arbor, Toronto, Onion City, Ottawa, Athens, Lisbon, Tokyo, Seoul, Bangkok, Impakt, Media City, Cinematexas, THAW, Chicago Underground, PDX, Images, Black Maria and others.

Gatten’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as in private collections in the United States, Canada and Japan.

Gatten was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1971. Shortly thereafter his family moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, where he lived for 20 years. Gatten received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998. A former Associate Professor at Ithaca College, he taught 16mm filmmaking as well as the history & theory of experimental film and international cinema in the Department of Cinema & Photography at Ithaca College from 1999-2005. He currently lives and works by the water in Brooklyn, New York and Seabrook Island, South Carolina, and teaches 16mm filmmaking as a Visiting Artist at The Cooper Union in New York City.