Chris Langdon

1952 Artist

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Biography

Born in 1952, Langdon grew up in Indiana and found much inspiration through her father, who worked as a newspaper-photographer. She began working with Super 8mm film at a young age and explored direct animation techniques throughout her teens.

Langdon produced about forty 16mm and 35mm films at the California Institute of the Arts, which she attended from 1971-76 and studied with Pat O'Neill, Robert Nelson and John Baldessari. In recent years her work received renewed attention in a series of screenings including "Now You Can do Anything" (2010) at RedCat and "Restoring the Los Angeles Avant-Garde" (2009) at the Hammer and the preservation of a selection of works by the Academy Film Archive.

The program notes for her Redcat show noted: "Her legendary filmwork, created between 1972 and ’76, is often a brash and funny mix of the so-called high and low: one short film uses a bondage setup as a pretext for a critique of structuralism, while a ludicrous and satirical portrait of Picasso reveals the questionable authority of moving images. Never ponderous or needlessly abstruse, Langdon’s films are direct, formally unique, and full of intuitive flair and wild humor; they delight in provoking and challenging not only modes of artmaking but our reception of art and its purported messages."

Filmography