SQURL featuring Carter Logan and Jim Jarmusch with films by Man Ray

"Music is very much a release for me because it's so immediate."—Jim Jarmusch, T Magazine

Noted director Jim Jarmusch returns to the Wex—this time with musical cohort Carter Logan as the post-rock duo SQÜRL. Together they'll perform live scores for a selection of surreal silent films by artist Man Ray. An Ohio native, Jarmusch visited the Wex in 2001 for a major retrospective of his films. In the early 1980s, he was a member of the New York–based No Wave bands Dark Days and Del-Byzanteens.

Music has long been central to Jarmusch's work as a director, and he and Logan, along with other partners, scored his films The Limits of Control (2009), Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), and Paterson (2016). For this project they give free rein to their own sonic impulses to create original music for Man Ray's entrancing short films, using haunting loops, analogue synthesizers, and treated guitar textures to build semi-improvised, drifting layers of ambient drones to complement the dreamlike images on-screen.

One of the most inventive artists of the 20th century, Man Ray was a legendary photographer, painter, and maker of objects and films. Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia in 1890, he knew the worlds of Greenwich Village in the avant-garde era following the 1913 Armory Show and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, where he played a key role in the Dada and Surrealist movements.

"I've been a fan of Man Ray's work for a long time, and I've been interested in Dadaists and Surrealists since my teens," Jarmusch noted in a 2015 interview. "He has such beautiful nonlinear experiments in film…In the 1920s, he was hanging the camera out of moving cars, shooting through textured glass, making photograms, there are literary references. I like his very free approach to cinema. He's making stuff not based on logic or formal constraints, but based on the unconscious, dream logic, and juxtaposition." SQÜRL extends that same alchemy to its own mix of psychedelic, industrial, and ambient sounds.

Get your tickets early for this special program of atmospheric music and film: Jarmusch's last appearance at the Wex sold out fast.

Man Ray films selected by SQÜRL:

• Le retour à la raison (Return to Reason, 1923)
• Emak Bakia (1926)
• L'étoile de mer (The Starfish, 1928)
• Les mystères du château de dé (The Mysteries of the Château de Dé, 1929)

Cosponsored by the Wexner Center's Departments of Film/Video and Performing Arts.