Posted October 6th, 2026 in Announcements, New Acquisitions, New Digital Files, New Films, News / Events

Canyon Cinema is delighted to announce that Lynn Marie Kirby‘s 16mm installation C to C: Several Centuries After the Double Slit Experiment (1995) and new digital files of 24 of Kirby’s film and video works, spanning the years 1976 to 2025, are now available.

This major deposit by the longtime Canyon artist member includes 14 titles that are new to the collection, as well as recent digitizations of nine 16mm films, and new digital files of Kirby’s Translation Series (1997-2003) and Latent Light Excavations Series (2003-2007).

C to C: Several Centuries After the Double Slit Experiment (1995, 45 minutes, color, sound, 16mm film, C stands, gobo arms, cine flags, sandbags, live piano)

The piece is a meditation on waves and particles, sound and light, and the history of science and metaphysics, cinematic space, and America.

Photons in Paris (1997-2000, 9.5 minutes, color, sound, digital file)

This series emerged from daily practice exercises in which I shot the same Parisian interior, focusing on moments of daily life, changing light and the digitizing process. These improvisations dilate the space/time of the image, as the digital patterns mirror the shape of the parquet floor.

Scans 1-55 (1997, 12.5 minutes, color, sound, digital file)

In conversation with Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document, this is a record and archive of our son’s growth in his first year, also of my community and the generous tradition of welcoming a child into the world with gifts of clothes. I scanned the gifted clothes after our son outgrew them. Labels on the baby clothes tell a parallel story of global production.

Frottage (1998/2025, 2 minutes, b&w, sound, digital file)

In 1998 I rubbed and scraped a 16mm black leader across the parquet floor of our Paris apartment. I rubbed a cassette tape recorder around the floor as well, recording the sound of the wood floors and ambient sounds coming in through the open windows. The 16mm film and sound are manipulated in the digital domain.

Verdun (1999/2025, 6 minutes, color, sound, digital file)

In 1999 my husband Stephen, my son James, and my parents visited Verdun. When I first lived in France in the 1960s we often went as a family to visit war sites around France. At Verdun I exposed a roll of 16mm film without a camera to the light of the battlefield. I also had my video camera, and photographed my young son in the landscape.

Study in Choreography for Camera Remote (2000, 6.5 minutes, color, sound, digital file)

Shot after returning to San Francisco from Paris in 2000, this is a seven-day excerpt of a year-long project in which I recorded my daily sweeping after breakfast. I think of this piece as a collaboration across time with Maya Deren and her film, Study in Choreography for Camera from 1945. Deren is thinking about the collapse of space and about the vocabulary of editing, in which she combines spaces. Here, I collapse the image on top of itself, thinking about time, using the remote in both shooting and editing.

Out of Step (2001, 5 minutes, color, sound, digital file)

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.

Six Shooter (2003, 4 minutes, color, sound, digital file)

Explores the mythos of the American West projected into the landscape. Following my son in his cowboy costume in an abandoned Western ‘set’ the video is both a critique and a study of masculinity, power, and the myth of the loner and the outlaw — an ode to John Ford and Howard Hawks.

Golden Gate Bridge Exposure: poised for parabolas (2004, 5 minutes, color, silent, digital file)

A tribute to the people who have lost their lives over the years in the construction of the bridge and from suicide. I see the bridge daily from my apartment and have long been haunted by the power of its presence, a gateway to both death and the world beyond mainland US borders.

Requiescat (2006, 4 minutes, b&w, sound, digital file

This 100-foot roll of film contains 1000 X’s. Each “X” scratched into the film is a prayer or a wish for the repose of a person killed in Iraq. In transferring the film to digital video, I did not etch an “X” anew, instead, I punched the transfer machine each time I saw an “X” pass in real time. This new gesture marks each death anew, with a skip or glitch or polarity change.

reflects sur les oliviers (2012/2025, 6 minutes, color, sound, digital file)

Olive trees and vineyards surrounded the house my parents rented for many summers 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.

One (2020, 11 minutes, color, sound, digital file)

in collaboration with James Kirby Rogers

During the first shut down of COVID, my son James came home as his dance company shut down. We walked to an abandoned pier at Aquatic Park every day for two months. Using James’s iPhone camera, I filmed James as he danced daily. I also filmed the site. We edited the film together.

Listen to the World Waking (2021, 17.5 minutes, color, sound, digital file)

During COVID I worked again with the San Francisco Girls Chorus, this time for six months on Zoom. We talked about finding a place where choristers could reflect, sit, and listen over the course of six months. Some choristers went to gardens and parks; some found spaces inside their homes. They sat, then took notes, collected objects, then sound and video. They sent me all of this collected material. From their texts, my long-time collaborator Denise Newman and I wrote a libretto. The choristers composed the music and sang the lyrics. I scanned their objects and made a video using all these materials.

gestes de la forêt (2023/2025, 10 minutes, color, sound, digital file)

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.

It Gets Bumpy (1976, 6 minutes, b&w, sound, 16mm or digital file)

I made this film when I rode the bus daily, watching and eavesdropping.

C.C. Beam Goes for a Walk (1978, 7.5 minutes, b&w, sound, 16mm or digital file)

in collaboration with Don Lloyd

This is a film about a cat going out for a walk on a leash. This modern metaphor is derived from the juxtaposition of dialectical recidivism and the vindication of self. Sexual and economic repression provide a background for the never-ending struggle of time against the arrival of the household robot, as humankind continues to claw at its environment.

Sincerely (1980, 14 minutes, color/b&w, sound, 16mm or digital file)

A film about choice. It is every woman’s choice, regardless of economics, whether or not to have children. This is a film about abortion, specifically state funding of abortion. With the Hyde amendment, the government cut funding of abortion except when the life of the mother is endangered. A woman writes a response in large pink letters to a senator’s refrain: “Try, really try not to get knocked up in the future.”

Across the Street (1982, 3 minutes, color, sound, 16mm or digital file)

I witness shocking events. This is an urban story, it is the story of an event which takes place across from my third floor bedroom window. As the story is retold again and again the emphasis shifts from the details of the event to the unanswered questions raised by the event.

Prelude (1982, 1 minute, color, sound, 16mm or digital file)

A film about light and aggression, heat and religion; she ascends from the piano.

Love, Lynn (1982, 1 minute, color, sound, 16mm or digital file)

A poem to my Mother and Grandmother.

Three Voices (1983, 5 minutes, color, sound, 16mm or digital file)

One in a series of films shot from my apartment windows. The character narrates possible scenarios of neighbors’ lives and talks about the mid-Atlantic accent and the threat of war as the windows are washed and people move in and out of their apartments.

Sharon and the Birds on the Way to the Wedding (1987, 20 minutes, color, sound, 16mm or digital file)

A film about the language and perception of love and romance. The film blurs the line between fact and fiction, personal and cultural experience. “She found that the truth didn’t sound real. She did research. She went through the magazines. She found that there existed a magazine kind of love that had a vocabulary of about twelve words. She found that if she rearranged these twelve words around different names and places that she could make a story.”

Three Domestic Interiors (1993, 37 minutes, color, sound, digital file)

The film portrays three people through their living room environments. These portraits push domestic order to the edge of collapse and loneliness. Only the telephone remains as a common link to the outside world, as the home becomes both sanctuary and prison. Using the wide angle properties of film and the close-up properties of video, the film explores the temporal and spatial relationship between the mediums of film and video. A film about loss.

Translation Series (1997-2003, color, digital file or DVD)

The Translation Series focuses on the temporal isomorphism and indexical relation between recording and reproduction. Film is used strictly as a light recording medium. I exposed 16mm raw film stock without a camera, by opening a film can and holding the film to the light of a site. This exposure encodes on the film both the light of the site and the performance of a gesture. 

These films are the result of a series of small “acts” that when projected function as documentations/translations of movement from space to time, meters to feet, photons to grain. While living in Paris, I mapped the contours of my apartment exposing film to the light of different rooms.

Latent Light Excavations (2003-2007, 76 minutes, color, digital file or DVD)

The Latent Light Excavation Series is a continuation of my engagement with American history and its residue in the landscape. I am interested in how sites carry traces of their history, but also act as reservoirs of memory, as virtual sites. Each final projection in the series is a document of the landscape itself, a slice through time to what lies below the visible, an archive and critique of what it means to be an American. 

For this series, I use a hybrid process, employing both 16mm film and digitization systems to excavate the invisible history of American landscapes and to reconsider and make visible media technology within the transfer process of film to digital.  Again I exposed 16mm raw film stock without a camera. As in the Translation Series, this exposure encodes on the film both the light of the site and the performance of a gesture. Next, the developed film is used as source material for an improvisation on a film to digital transfer/encoding deck, using the film material like a chart or thematic framework on which to improvise. 

The material aspects of the film source medium are revealed through usually hidden, unintended and unwanted artifacts: dust, scratches, hole punches, head and tail leader information. Uniquely and typically unwanted digital artifacts are introduced to the transfer process. 

These American sites are chosen for their complex histories. The works function at times as memorial gestures or homages and at times as celebrations or critiques. 

This series eventually expanded to include exposures at international sites, including Lebanon, Rwanda and the Jordan staircase in St. Petersburg, among others.