Anthony McCall

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

The film is screened in a completely dark, smoke-filled room with no seats or screen; the projector must be visible

A vertical (standing), deeply folded traveling wave passes through and around an only partly visible cone at its center which vigorously and repeatedly expands and contracts.

No synopsis available yet.

Vertical video installation by Anthony Mccall.

The film is screened in a completely dark, smoke-filled room with no seats or screen; the projector must be visible

A vertical (standing), deeply folded traveling wave passes through and around an only partly visible cone at its center which vigorously and repeatedly expands and contracts.

Vertical video installation by Anthony Mccall.

Breath (2004) was especially fascinating in how the light was used to create an architectural like enclosure that is 10 meters tall with a 4-meter base.

A flat blade of light rotating from a fixed central axis.

Swarm, 2026, McCall’s most recent work, premiering in the exhibition, draws on the rising significance of drones as an increasing presence in daily life. The installation is composed of two conical-light volumes that rotate slowly in opposite directions, one clockwise and the other counterclockwise, over a duration of fifteen minutes. Accompanying the mesmerizing visuals is a rich soundscape that gradually intensifies as a powerful auditory experience. The dramatic, progressive soundtrack serves as a continuation of the ongoing collaboration between McCall and Grubbs.

Three male voices dissect one edition of The New York Times through a series of locked-off shots, revealing the prejudice and latent content of news and advertisements, reading images as texts and presenting text as an image.

This key work of the late 1970s, now digitally restored, is a unique attempt to combine contemporary debates around formalism, feminism and psychoanalysis in film. Implicitly engaged in a critical dialogue with filmmakers like Yvonne Rainer and Jean-Luc Godard, as well as the theorists of 'Screen' magazine, Sigmund Freud's Dora is a milestone in the evolution of structuralist film strategies into broader questions of representation.

This key work of the late 1970s, now digitally restored, is a unique attempt to combine contemporary debates around formalism, feminism and psychoanalysis in film. Implicitly engaged in a critical dialogue with filmmakers like Yvonne Rainer and Jean-Luc Godard, as well as the theorists of 'Screen' magazine, Sigmund Freud's Dora is a milestone in the evolution of structuralist film strategies into broader questions of representation.

Split Second consists of two separate points of light projected at different heights. The two projections – one elliptical, one flat – meet and combine to form a single slowly changing line-drawing. The projections expand to reveal a flat blade and an elliptical cone, which combine in space to create a complex field of rotating, interpenetrating planes.

A vertical solid-light installation that extends McCall’s investigation of perception through an intricate dialogue between light and sound. Projected from above onto a plinth, the work produces a slowly shifting cone of light that can be experienced from every angle. Accompanied by an original score by acclaimed composer David Grubbs, SKYLIGHT evokes the gradual approach and recession of an imagined thunderstorm through distant rumbles, flashes of lightning, and the steady rhythm of falling rain. The work belongs to a series of works in which McCall explores the dynamic relationship between visual form, silence, and sound.

The first in the new Solid Light film series. Like Four Projected Movements almost thirty years earlier, the installation is projected against a wall; the piece was constructed from back waves that pass imperceptibly through one another to create a mutable series of interior spaces.

In Raised Voices, there are two competing and intersecting forms within the horizontal projection; an incomplete ellipse that varies in its diameter, and a straight diagonal line that splinters in two as it turns through 180 degrees. The forms develop according to a precise durational structure, shifting at a pace that can sometimes be indiscernible, yet presenting itself continuously within the conical field of light.

This experimental "film" consists of an empty room with a bare lightbulb, and windows covered with a translucent material, for a duration of 24 hours. It is not necessary for visitors to stay for the entire duration - they can come and go as they please. Created by Anthony McCall, it is based on the architectural framing of time and light. It came at the end of a series of works in which McCall was stripping back cinema to its absolute minimum - light, time, and human experience/perception.

“Cone of Variable Volume was a conical form, which expanded and contracted in volume, like a lung. The rhythmic movement is imperceptible at first, and progressively accelerates in speed.”

Vertical video installation by Anthony Mccall.

LINE DESCRIBING A CONE is what I term a solid light film. It deals with the projected light beam itself, rather than treating the light beam as a mere carrier of coded information, which is decoded when it strikes the flat surface (the screen). It is projected in the normal way, on a 16mm film projector. Though inevitably there will be a wall that limits the length of the beam, a screen is not necessary. The viewer watches the film, by standing with his, or her, back towards what would normally be the screen, and looking along the beam towards the projector itself. The film begins as a coherent line of light, like a laser beam, and develops through the 30 minute duration, into a complete, hollow cone of light. Line Describing a Cone deals with one of the irreducible, necessary conditions of film: projected light. It deals with this phenomenon directly, independent of any other consideration. It is the first film to exist solely in real, three-dimensional, space.

Evolving beams are projected in two directions at once.

For Landscape for Fire, Anthony McCall and members of the British artist collaborative Exit followed McCall’s pre-determined score to torch containers of flammable material across a field. McCall describes it: "Over a three-year period, I did a number of these sculptural performances in landscape. Fire was the medium. The performances were based on a square grid defined by 36 small fires (6 x 6). The pieces, which usually took place at dusk, had a systematic, slowly changing structure." The work brought the grid — a conceptual focus for many artists in the 1970s and after — into a natural landscape, merging it with the vagaries of outdoor space and fire.

Landscape for White Squares features individuals emerging out of a dense fog, carrying large, square, white sheets.

A digital re-make and reinterpretation of McCall’s landmark 1973 thirty-minute film installation Line Describing a Cone.

A single projection in which the “split” is created by interrupting the throw of light with a wall-sized mirror. The plane of light is reflected back onto itself, creating a shifting volumetric cone, which exists seamlessly both in real space and as a reflected object. (Sean Kelly)

A single fifteen minute quarter of a triangular edge of light through 90 degrees, along one wall, becomes four distinct architectural interventions through the intervention of the projector.

McCall’s digital animation presents a slowly shifting beam of “solid light” whose physical properties become outlined within the haze-filled space of the gallery and are further enhanced through viewer interaction. Exploring light across space and time, this immersive presentation complements CAM’s concurrent exhibition Place is the Space through the encounter between projection and architecture.