Anthony McCall

Anthony McCall was born in St Paul’s Cray in 1946. He began working with film and performance in the early 1970s, beginning with a series of open-air performances involving fire sculpture, entitled Landscape for Fire(1972). Following a move to New York in 1973, he exhibited Line Describing a Cone(1973), a light sculpture projection which was the first of a series of works concerning the relationship between projected light and the participatory space of the audience. By contrast, the single screen collaborative film projects Argument(1978) and Sigmund Freud’s Dora(1979) engaged with and contributed to contemporary debates concerning notions of representation, gender and sexuality.

McCall’s films and light projection installations have been shown extensively, from early screenings at The London Film-makers’ Co-op (1974) and the Millennium Film Workshop, New York (1974). His recent installations include The Whitney Museum, New York (2001/2) , The Mead Gallery, Warwick (2004) and the Sean Kelly Gallery, New York (2006) and employ digital technology to produce a growing series of light projections, which develop from his early work. He lives and works in New York.

Light Years, Mark Godfrey interview to Anthony McCall, Issue 99, May 2006