Roger Beebe, (rock/hard place)

featured in Between a Love and a Hard Place, a video art exhibition presented by Vinegar at the Media Window in downtown Birmingham, Alabama.

Morro Bay, California is a little coastal tourist town known mostly for the Morro Rock, a volcanic plug that sits at the mouth of the Bay. In all the postcards of Morro Bay, the image is framed so that you can't tell that just beyond the edge of the postcard, maybe a few hundred yards from the Rock, is a gargantuan power plant with 3 towering smoke stacks. This film tries to restore the power plant to the frame, so that we can start thinking about what the juxtaposition of these two massive objects might mean.

(2005, TRT 5:15, 16mm)

Roger Beebe is a filmmaker whose work since 2006 consists primarily of multiple-projector performances and essayistic videos that explore the world of found images and the "found" landscapes of late capitalism. He has screened his films around the globe at such unlikely venues as the CBS Jumbotron in Times Square and McMurdo Station in Antarctica as well as more likely ones including Sundance and the Museum of Modern Art with solo shows at Anthology Film Archives, El Centro de Cultura Digital in Mexico City, and Los Angeles Filmforum among many other venues. Beebe is also a film programmer: he ran Flicker, a festival of small-gauge film in Chapel Hill, NC, from 1997-2000 and was the founder and Artistic Director of FLEX, the Florida Experimental Film Festival from 2004-2014. He is currently a Professor in the Departments of Art and Theatre, Film, and Media Arts at the Ohio State University where he helped launch the Moving-Image Production major in Autumn 2017.