Nick Doyle, “Smoke and Mirrors,” mixed media performance, 2011 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
7Eleven Gallery
711 Washington St. between Perry St. and 11th
Tuesday – Saturday through February 18, free
www.7elevengallery.com
Back in 1946, the Southland Ice Company began calling its chain of convenience stores 7-Eleven, named for the hours it was open. Today there are more 7-Elevens in the world than McDonald’s restaurants, and inside you can find a wide range of relatively edible products made from different chemical reactions, most famously the Slurpee, which has been known to result in brain freeze. Back in 2008, Sabrina Blaichman, Caroline Copley, and Genevieve Hudson-Price started the nomadic 7Eleven Gallery, which has held several art shows around the city over the last few years but has returned to its original home at 711 Washington St. Its latest exhibition, “Alchemy,” is a collection of works that involve the transmutation of materials into a wide range of multimedia objects that elicit aesthetic, philosophical, and physical reactions from those who partake of its resulting product, sure to stimulate the brain, not freeze it. The centerpiece of “Alchemy” is Nick Doyle’s “Smoke and Mirrors,” a large-scale installation of a volcano hovering on the edge of a city; visitors can flip switches from a control board to add lightning strikes, circling clouds, steam rising from below, an eruption, and even earthquakes, turning the viewer into a kind of mad scientist with the power to change the world. (Doyle will be at the gallery on February 10 at 7:00 giving free tattoos for three hours.)
Eve Andee Laramee, “Invisible Fire,” depression glass, UV light, 2011 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The artist known simply as GAINES has transformed four wooden doors into electrified instruments. Video artist Casey Neistat becomes an unseen chemist, performing “The Whisky Water Trick” to Tex Ritter’s “Jack o’ Diamonds (Rye Whiskey).” Sculptor Thomas Beale uses found shells to make an untitled knoblike form sticking out of the wall. Alchemy generally involves turning base metals into gold and silver, but Michael St. John takes a different tack, unfolding a trademark-blue Tiffany box into an abstract geometric shape. But the real gem of the show is Eve Andee Laramee, who combines artistic exploration and scientific investigation in “The Memories of the Stones,” a Victorian steampunk viewing globe right out of Jules Verne, with the addition of streaming video; “Dustball as the Model of the Universe,” a ball of dust encased in a glass bottle; “An Unnatural History of Discontinuity,” a series of acrylic, collage, and ink on paper pieces that evoke scientific experiments; and “Invisible Fire,” glowing depression glass formally arranged in a downstairs cave. In addition, Laramee has a curio cabinet in the gallery’s store, where many of her old-fashioned, offbeat, alchemical objects are for sale. And no, you cannot get hot dogs, Slurpees, or other inscrutable food and drink behind the counter.
One of the all-time-great spaghetti Westerns, Sergio Leone’s dusty three-hour operatic oater stars Clint Eastwood as the Good (Blondie), Lee Van Cleef as the Bad (Angel Eyes), and Eli Wallach as the Ugly (Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez, whose list of criminal offenses is a riot), three unique individuals after $200,000 in Confederate gold buried in a cemetery in the middle of nowhere. Nearly 20 minutes of never-before-seen footage added to the film a few years ao, with Wallach and Eastwood overdubbing brand-new dialogue, so if you haven’t seen it in a while, it might just be time to catch it again, this time on the big screen as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “See It Big!” series. Ennio Morricone’s unforgettable score and Torino delli Colli’s gorgeous widescreen cinematography were also marvelously enhanced; their work in the scene when Tuco first comes upon the graveyard will make you dizzy with delight. And then comes one of the greatest finales in cinema history. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is screening at the museum on February 10 at 7:00, with the series continuing with such classics as Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns on February 19 (introduced by Dan Callahan), The Sound of Music on March 3, North by Northwest on March 9-10, Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror on March 11 (introduced by Geoff Dyer), and Touch of Evil on March 16-17.
Avant-garde filmmaker Bill Morrison (Decasia) collaborated with Icelandic musician and composer Jóhann Jóhannsson in the elegiac The Miners’ Hymn, a tribute to the now-gone collieries, or coal mines, of Northeast England. The fifty-two-minute documentary opens with new aerial shots of the locations where the Durham coal mines were, since replaced by luxury housing and megastores. The film shows the birth and death dates of several collieries going back to the nineteenth century, then seamlessly blends into archival black-and-white footage of the miners at work underground, the community coming together for a local fair, and a union rally during a strike that includes a confrontation with the police. There is no text and no narration in The Miners’ Hymn; instead, Morrison’s savvy editing of the found footage, consisting of both moving pictures and still photographs primarily acquired through the British Film Institute and the BBC, brings the old-fashioned town and its old-fashioned ways to vibrant life even though they roll across the screen in slow motion. Jóhannsson’s score punctuates the proceedings with an occasional brassy flare when not sounding more funereal. Despite the lack of text and narration, Morrison’s point of view is clear and all too obvious, paying homage to something that has been lost, and he is never quite able to make an emotional or personal connection with the viewer. However, The Miners’ Hymns contains remarkable footage that still manages to tell an important story, even if it is one-sided and lacking at least a little more historical context. The Miners’ Hymns is playing February 8-14 at Film Forum, along with Morrison’s short films Release (2010), featuring footage of Al Capone’s release from prison, Outerborough (2005), which looks at the Brooklyn Bridge, and The Film of Her (1996), a documentary about a Library of Congress copyright office employee who finds a vault full of old paper movies. Morrison will be at Film Forum for the 8:00 show on February 8, which will also feature live violin by Todd Reynolds. 
