The Roxie Screens 40-Plus Years of Films by Lynn Marie Kirby

For decades, San Francisco artist Lynn Marie Kirby has created artwork that defies easy classification. In part, this is because she is a natural collaborator, and her work shifts and grows in complexity with the addition of each new voice.

One of my first encounters with Kirby’s work was The 24th Street Listening Project, a 2012 experimental walking tour she created in collaboration with Alexis Petty. The roundabout and sensitive neighborhood portrait culminated in a potted plant giveaway.

A few years later, Kirby and Cristoph Steger temporarily took over the former Alhambra Theater on Polk Street (now a Crunch Gym) for The Alhambra Project, a piece that similarly engaged a cast of collaborators and spilled out into the surrounding neighborhood. Again and again, Kirby’s poetic and abstracted approach to art-making draws lines between disparate things: bodybuilding and tile patterns, fortune cookies and paint colors.

On Sunday, March 30, Canyon Cinema presents “the insufficient frame,” a program of Kirby’s film, video and performance work at the Roxie Theater. More collaborations and improvisations are on view here, along with a wide variety of material approaches to filmmaking (including live singing!).

Highlighting a selection from the 1980s to the present, the screening is followed by a conversation between Kirby and filmmaker and scholar Jeffrey Skoller (who contributed an essay to the recent publication from X Artists’ Books, Time & Place: on the work of Lynn Marie Kirby).

The Roxie program includes 11 pieces, ranging in length from one minute to 22. In one of the earliest films, Kirby’s 1987 Sharon and the Birds on the Way to the Wedding, a woman talks about the fading appeal of marriage and her pet birds, while a narrator describes the discovery of “a magazine kind of love.” There’s no sense here of what’s real and what’s staged. The whole thing is interspersed with images of firefighters hosing down a blaze — is it marriage itself that’s the dumpster fire?

A more recent digital video returns us to the confusing, claustrophobic days of 2021, when Kirby made Listen to the World Waking over a period of six months with the San Francisco Girls Chorus. Drawn from objects, images and notes gathered by members of the chorus, the resulting video captures a distorted, ghostly time in the girls’ lives. Their sweet voices sing a haunting libretto written by Kirby and longtime collaborator Denise Newman.

Kirby’s program is part of Canyon Cinema’s ongoing series of monographic screenings of “classic, overlooked, new and restored films.” (Last year they programmed the Toney W. Merrit mini-retrospective “As I Am.”) Take this rare chance to peer into Canyon Cinema’s incredible vault, see a local artist’s work in depth, and hear from Kirby directly about that work. Such opportunities don’t come around often.

‘Lynn Marie Kirby: the insufficient frame’ plays at 3:40 p.m. on March 30, 2025 at the Roxie Theater. Details here.