In a career spanning nearly five decades, Leslie Thornton has produced an influential body of
work in film and video. Her early encounters with experimental, structuralist, and cinéma vérité
traditions as a student in the 1970s fueled her iconoclastic take on the moving image and gave
shape to her practice of weaving together her own footage and voice with archival film and
audio. In part through her forceful and dynamic use of sound, Thornton exposes the limits of
language and vision in her works, while acknowledging the ways that language and vision
nevertheless remain central to scientific discourse and narrative in general.

The relationship between technology, power, and violence is an enduring concern for Thornton.
In early works, such as X-TRACTS (1975), All Right You Guys (1976) and Jennifer, Where Are
You? (1981), Thornton contends with the basic conditions of representation in film and how the
camera itself wields power. In Let Me Count the Ways (2004–ongoing) and Cut From Liquid to
Snake (2018), Thornton takes up the United States’ history of nuclear warfare—a subject
fraught with personal resonance for her, as both her father and grandfather were involved in the
Manhattan Project, the top-secret effort that produced the atomic bombs that the U.S. dropped
on Japan in the final weeks of World War II. A touchstone of experimental film, Peggy and Fred
in Hell is a multi-chapter work in film and video that surfaces the Cold War-era anxieties that
shaped Thornton’s formative years and plumbs the psychological impact of technology in the
decades since.

Thornton’s recent film Ground (2020) embeds the voice of a physicist discussing particle decay
within elegant yet foreboding technological landscapes. Hemlock (2021), which debuts in this
exhibition, complements and builds on Ground. In this newly-commissioned two channel video,
conversations about particle physics, multi-dimensional universes, and anti-matter overlay
shallow-focus shots taken in the woods of New Hampshire that reveal intimate patterns of
growth and decomposition.

The exhibition’s title, Begin Again, Again—borrowed from a line in Peggy and Fred in Hell—
alludes to human-made cycles of destruction and renewal as well the hallmarks of Thornton’s
practice: an accumulation and repetition of images and language and a radically open-ended
approach to observing, processing, and understanding.

Thornton’s exhibition is organized by Natalie Bell, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.

Text by: MIT List Visual Arts Center

View the Exhibition Brrochure (PDF)