LYNN MARIE KIRBY
PRODUITS DE FRANCE
11 - 13.09.2025
The Film Gallery is pleased to present Lynn Marie Kirby: Produits de France, the first solo show in France of the San Francisco-based artist and filmmaker.
“While living in Paris in the 1990s, I mapped the contours of my apartment, exposing 16mm film to the light of different rooms,” notes Kirby who in that era discovered the possibilities of working with the film to video transfer process as another recording tool. This period of performative “gestures in time” led to further experimentation with both camera-less filmmaking and incorporating emerging video technologies into her celluloid practice.
Displayed as a triptych across three flat-screen monitors, Scans 1–55 (1997) features a succession of digital scanning of her son’s baby clothes from his first year of life. In addition to video works, the gallery display includes a broadsheet created with her late friend and collaborator Etel Adnan in relation to their short video Back, Back Again to Paris (2013). Also on view are a series of broadsheets emerging from performative collaborations staged at Cushion Works, San Francisco, presented in 2021 under the title THE WEATHER IS NOWADAYS CRAZY. The exhibition took as its point of departure a suite of collaborative drawings made with Etel Adnan in Paris.
For the exhibition, Kirby has created a new scent called Neuvième (2025), which alludes to the arrondissement she lived in and her sensory associations with this city. Guest curator Tanya Zimbardo provides an accompanying essay for Lynn Marie Kirby: Produits de France.
On September 17, The Film Gallery will host a screening program featuring ten short films that Lynn Marie Kirby shot in France since the late 1990s when she lived in Paris, including the premiere of several new works from revisited earlier sketches.
SCREENING
On September 17, The Film Gallery will host a screening program featuring ten short films that Lynn Marie Kirby shot in France since the late 1990s when she lived in Paris, including the premiere of several new works that revisited earlier sketches.
Photons in Paris: image encoding. 1 and 3, 1997–1998 (3:39, 2:56) digital video
This series emerged from a daily practice of shooting the interior of my Parisian apartment. Edits are determined by stressing the equipment to crash during import.
Translation Series, 1997–2000 (1:57, 0:56) 16mm film to digital video
I exposed 16mm raw film stock to the light of our apartment by opening a film can and holding the film to the light. This exposure encodes on the film both the light of the site and the performance of a gesture. I mapped the contours of several different rooms in our Paris apartment.
Couloir, I walked down the hallway capturing the light and space, exposing film as I moved. The film is printed with different lights at the lab, emphasizing the layered space of the emulsion.
L’ Entrée, I exposed film in the entrance foyer. The film is manipulated in the film to digital video transfer, using the transfer process as another recording tool.
Frottage, 1999, 2025 (1:53) 16mm black leader to digital video
In 1999 I rubbed and scraped 16mm black leader across the parquet floor of our Paris apartment. I rubbed a cassette tape recorder around the floor as well, recording the rubbing sound and ambient sounds coming in through the open windows. The image and audio after transfer are manipulated in the digital domain.
Out of Step, 2001 (5:03) digital video
Shot on a family walk beside the sea in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, the piece has a three-part construction, a medium-paced opening, a super-fast central movement and a concluding adagio. Varying the speed on the digital deck as I inputted video into the editing machine, I inserted different speeds and froze images on top of one another.
Verdun, 1999, 2025 (6:20) 16mm film to digital video
In 1999 my husband Stephen, my son James, and my parents went to visit Verdun. When I first lived in France in the 1960s we often went as a family to visit war sites around France. I exposed a roll of 16mm film to the light of the battlefield.
gestes de la forêt, 2023, 2025 (9:07) iPhone video with live voiceover
In the summer of 2023 we stayed in a house with my mother and family in the Loire Valley. My son, James Kirby Rogers, and I walked to the nearby forest every day and improvised together.
reflects sur les oliviers, 2012, 2025 (5:46) digital video
Olive trees and vineyards surrounded the house my parents rented for many summers near Cotignac in Provence. Inspired by the Mediterranean sun, Vincent van Gogh’s olive tree paintings and my friend Etel Adnan’s paintings on the same themes, I revisited the footage in 2025.
Back, Back Again to Paris, 2013 (1:52) digital video in collaboration with Etel Adnan
Conceived as a subversive intervention when a collaboration between Etel and myself was rejected from the show Words and Places: Etel Adnan. This work consists of sentences from Etel’s Paris When It’s Naked (1993) containing the word “Paris” read into a speech-to-text program. Etel then intervened into her earlier, now “translated” text. This block of text became a broadsheet distributed outside the show with a scan code link to the accompanying video made up of mistranslations of the word “Paris” and outlines of Etel’s paintings on view inside the exhibition. Back, Back Again to Paris and two other collaborative works are included in our book Oracular Transmissions (2020; X Artists’ Books).
Following the screening, Kirby — who is staying in Paris this fall — will be joined in conversation with film scholar Charlie Hewison. Copies of Time & Place: on the work of Lynn Marie Kirby (2024) published by X Artists’ Books in Los Angeles are available at The Film Gallery. Oracular Transmissions (2020) is also available through Les Presses du Réel.
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Lynn Marie Kirby works in a variety of time-based forms, including film, public installation and performance, engaging our relationship to place, often with text, often with collaborators. Each of Kirby’s projects map emotional topographies, her most recent work uses scent, taste, and touch to explore expanded embodied perception beyond the visual and aural, to engage the public in the history of particular sites.
Tanya Zimbardo is an independent curator and writer based in San Francisco, California. She has organized exhibitions and screenings for a range of venues including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Artists’ Television Access, Canyon Cinema Foundation, San Francisco Cinematheque, The Roxie, and UC Berkeley. Zimbardo has contributed to publications such as Feminist Media Histories, INCITE Journal of Experimental Media, Otherzine, SFMOMA Open Space, and VoCA Journal. She co-organized the 2019 public program Lynn Marie Kirby: Collaborations with Etel Adnan and contributed a related essay for Time & Place: on the work of Lynn Marie Kirby published by X Artists’ Books in Los Angeles.
Charlie Hewison is a film researcher, member of Collectif Jeune Cinéma and artistic director of the Festival des Cinémas différents et expérimentaux de Paris. Hewison contributed an essay on Kirby’s Latent Light Excavations (2003–2007) series to Time & Place: on the work of Lynn Marie Kirby (2024) published by X Artists’ Books in Los Angeles.
Gestures in Time: Lynn Marie Kirby in France
In reflecting on her sensory associations with Paris, Lynn Marie Kirby describes her love of “the smell of wet wool in cafes in winter, the dirt under torn up pavement, water as it runs in gutters in the mornings. These were some of my inspirations for the scent Neuvième.”
On the occasion of Lynn Marie Kirby: Produits de France at The Film Gallery, the San Francisco-based artist and filmmaker has created an ephemeral artwork of a takeaway postcard visitors can spray with a displayed scent called Neuvième (2025). The name nods to the 9th arrondissement where Kirby’s parents moved their family when she was fifteen after having lived in multiple countries. It was not a place where most foreigners lived at the time. Her parents first moved to Paris when they were married in 1948 and worked for the U.S. initiative called the Marshall Plan.
As a teenager living in Paris in the 1960s, Kirby discovered her first perfume, Vent Vert, invented in 1947 by perfumer Germaine Cellier for Pierre Balmain, which she wore for many years until the original fragrance formula was changed, to her disappointment. After her first years of university in Paris, Kirby’s parents encouraged her to relocate to the United States in the 1970s to continue her education. She settled in San Francisco after studying sculpture and then film at the San Francisco Art Institute, becoming deeply involved with the experimental media community as both an artist and longtime educator.
For Kirby, scent as a “time-based experience” extends from her approach to time-based media artworks, “smell takes us to a deep place in our brains and creates a different experience than the rest of the senses. I can come upon a scent and suddenly move across time in a flash.” She worked prior with a natural perfumer on a fragrance for the performance to hold to miss to remember (2017), a site-specific intervention held outside of a church during the Venice Biennale. In collaboration with Sarah Bird, the public was invited to join Kirby in attempting to perform the tender gesture depicted in Giovanni Belline’s Madonna and Child (1480), a painting stolen from the Madonna dell’Orto church in 1993. Afterwards the embrace, each participant was given a small vial of the scent as a touchstone of remembrance. The fragrance offered an olfactory journey to Venice: frankincense, the sea, rose gardens, geraniums, Africa Stone, orange trees, and olive groves.
Olive groves and vineyards surrounded the property of the house in Provence that Kirby’s parents rented, which was situated in the countryside near a small town named Contignac. For over twenty years, Kirby and her extended family gathered there every August until last year when her mother died. Sunlight glints through the olive trees in reflects sur les oliviers (2012, 2025), which when shot in 2012 was in part inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s olive tree paintings. In revisiting and reworking this impressionistic footage a decade later, she gestures to her late friend Etel Adnan’s paintings of olive trees and the Mediterranean sun with overlaid forms of rich color.
While living in Paris in the 1990s, Kirby would also spend more time with Adnan, an artist and poet she knew who for decades divided the year between Paris and the San Francisco Bay Area. Adnan was among the poets represented in an installation project In Transit: Between and Beyond (1999/2020) that Kirby collaborated on with filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha while living in Paris, which premiered in San Francisco, and was more recently reprised for Manifesta 13 Marseille. On display at The Film Gallery is a broadsheet created with Adnan in relation to their short, animated video Back, Back Again to Paris (2013).
A new work, gestes de la forêt (2023, 2025), distills the essence of the daily summertime walks in a forest in the Loire Valley, in which Kirby and her son James Kirby Rogers, a professional dancer, playfully interact and improvise with the camera in the verdant surroundings. During the screening, Kirby will perform a live voiceover of a letter directed fondly to James. At different stages of his life, he has both appeared and collaborated on the process of several of his mother’s films and video works.
Just after James was born in 1996, Kirby’s husband Stephen Rogers was offered a key job opportunity in Paris. She took a leave of absence from California College of the Arts in San Francisco (where she taught until 2024). They moved with an open-ended timeline, taking as a serendipitous sign that the available apartment they liked best was on the same street Kirby had lived in until her early twenties. Kirby turned her attention to being in Paris and made “all the work in the apartment mainly with what was at hand—James, the floor, the unexposed film, the baby clothes, the paper bags from merchants.” Before she left San Francisco, Kirby purchased a scanner and a large Apple computer to bring along with rolls of unexposed 16mm film. With the support of her Guggenheim fellowship, Kirby purchased a computer video editing system and a small video camera. Translation Series (1997–1999), Photons in Paris (1998–2000), and Frottage (1999, 2025) are all camera-less films recorded in Kirby’s former Paris apartment. The works grew out of her observations of light in the apartment at the same time as she was exposing 16mm film to the light of the apartment as a way to record the shifting light in different rooms.
In Photons in Paris: image encoding. 1 (1997), we hear and catch glimpses of James as a barefoot toddler scampering across the floor, the parquet wood pattern echoing the pixelated glitch forms momentarily breaking up the video image. Fast forwarding, rewinding, and editing live while embracing crashes, became performative “gestures in time.” The new video and editing equipment allowed her to expand from a celluloid practice while harkening back to her conceptual roots. This series was notably featured at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in BitStreams (2001), a watershed survey of contemporary art that harnessed digital media.
In transferring the film to digital video for the abstract Translation Series, Kirby discovered the possibilities of working with the transfer process as another recording tool, which led to her renowned Latent Light Excavation Series (2003–2007). Paris-based film scholar Charlie Hewison describes in an essay on that series and Kirby’s practice, that “new digital artifacts produced by the widespread digitization of photochemical film have tended to obscure this translation process
from one medium to another; her film proposes therefore to look at this process rather than simply through it.” For several recently edited works, Kirby has opted to create a frame-within-a-frame—overlaying the original 4:3 aspect ratio video footage onto the new 16:9 horizontal rectangle to reflect the work’s material history.
Displayed as a triptych on flat-screen monitors, Scans 1–55 (1997) archives her baby son’s growth in his first year through his outgrown clothes, but also notes the gift givers—her community which included such fellow artists and filmmakers such as Taraneh Hemami, Gunvor Nelson, and Ruby Yang. The clothing tags also tell a story of global production. Kirby regarded this personal piece as a feminist conversation with artist Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–79). Decades later, her recent book Time & Place: on the work of Lynn Marie Kirby (2024) published by X Artists’ Books in Los Angeles, employs the strategy of scans for black-and-white illustrations. Kirby has often preferred to explore alternate forms of documentation of performances and events instead of production photography.
During the four years her family lived in Paris, Kirby also began shooting outdoor works like Out of Step (2001) and Verdun (1999, 2025) on family trips around France. They continued to return to Paris and the south of France every summer. For Kirby, France has been a family place where she busily made work, but did not necessarily endeavor to exhibit. This gallery presentation and accompanying screening program of ten short films with Kirby in person at The Film Gallery, brings together for the first time a selection of works Kirby shot in France since the late 1990s including the premiere of new pieces revisited from earlier improvisatory sketches. From the dancing sunlight to the sound of laughter, the works convey the artist’s sustained engagement with place and the magical details found in recording everyday life.
Tanya Zimbardo