Vincent Grenier has made experimental films since the early seventies, and his films have been shown in the United States, Canada and Europe at showcases such as the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, the Anthology Film Archives, the Pacific Film Archives, the Collective for Living Cinema and Cinéma Parallel in Montréal. His films and videos have earned him nine production grants from the Canada Council in the period between 1974 and1992, and in New York State, from CAPS (1979), NYFA (1995), ETC (1992 & 1994), NYSCA (2007-2008) and John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2010-2011).
He has made over two dozen films and since the late 90’s more than a dozen videos. Many of these videos were chosen in yearly selections of Grenier’s work at key avant garde film festivals such as Views from the Avant Garde of the New York Film Festival , the Rotterdam Film Festival, in the Netherland, the Onion City Film Festival, Chicago, and Media City Film and Video Festival, Windsor, Ontario. Grenier’s films and videos were the subjects of retrospectives at Media City, Windsor, Ontario and Images Film & Video Festival’s Canadian Images Spotlight, Toronto, both in 2006. Seven of his films & videos were curated in the Whitney Museum of American Art 1970-2000 American Century Film program. Films by Grenier are included in the Donell media library in NYC, the National Film Archive, Ottawa, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, AGO, Toronto and at many other institutions in Canada and the US.
He is a Professor in the Cinema Department at Binghamton University.
“If Grenier’s work provides pleasures both anticipated (the formal beauty and exacting eye of a great media artist) and unanticipated (the many contradictions, misprisions, and perceptual paradoxes the works induce), his films and videos also seem to want to tell us, in very direct ways, that those pleasures are only partly of the artist’s making. They are also accidental and given to chance; they are also freely available. And so in a way, I think Vincent Grenier’s work, if I may call upon one of the hoary old saws of the avant-garde, aims to “teach us how to see,” but in ways a bit different than how that concept has been trotted out in the past by mythopoets and structuralists alike.” – Michael Sicinski, Moving Image Source
“Grenier, a widely celebrated film / video maker who began working in the 70s, is an artist who brings a patient and revealing sensitivity to the image. Rigorous, beautiful, and with a wry sense of comedy.” – Ekrem Serdar, Experimental Response Cinema
The event program includes:
Watercolor (12.5 min., digital video, 2013)
You (12 min., 16mm, 1990)
Closer Outside (9.5 min., 16mm, 1981)
Color Study (4.5 min., digital video, 2000)
Tremors (13 min., 16mm to HD, 1984)
Intersection (7 min., digital video, 2015)
Commute (6.5 min., digital video, 2018)
Tabula Rasa (7.5 min., digital video, 1993-2004)
This Series is co-sponsored by the Cinema Department and Harpur College Dean’s Speakers Series.
Free & open to the public
