The exhibit, "Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film since 1945," is being mounted by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, where it will run from March 17-July 28 before touring the country.

The show is a highlight of the Motion Picture Centennial, a nationwide celebration of the history of the motion picture. It will encompass works by many of the postwar period's most remarkable filmmakers and visual artists. Conrad was one of the first media artists to reduce the film experience to its most fundamental elements, employing cinema as a method of examining the filmatic apparatus itself. "The Flicker" is the best-known and most widely exhibited of his three dozen works of film and video art and scores of community video productions.

He points out that, until recently, there has been very little opportunity for the public to see this body of seminal films, and they have never been available for viewing on an ongoing basis. Lately, however, major museums and galleries have begun to attend to the media arts, exhibiting them through their institution's core programming.

MOCA curator Kerry Brougher explains that this exhibit will present the development of film in the postwar era as a progressive concentration and contraction of film "language"-which, in these terms, reached an extreme value in "The Flicker"-and its subsequently re-expansion to fill the larger arena occupied by contemporary cinema.

Because of its significance in the history of cinematic art and its relationship to the show's central conceit, "The Flicker" will be exhibited continuously as an art installation. It will serve as a centerpiece in an exhibition/screening program featuring 160 art objects, 60 films and film excerpts, 15 installations and a film series organized by MOCA and the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

The audience will find Conrad's work in the show's second of three sections, "Cinema Degree Zero," which represents the period between 1960 and 1975, when artists helped pushed cinema into an expanded realm of visual art. In addition to Conrad's work, the audience will find in this section the work of pioneering French filmmaker Stan Brakhage, the late UB media study faculty members Paul Sharits and Hollis Frampton, plus Peter Kubelka, Chris Marker, Stanley Kubrick, Michelangelo Antonini and others.

These creators of art and feature films often emphasized, as Conrad did in "The Flicker," the materiality of the celluloid, frame, light and flicker. Their tendency was to undercut the cinematic experience by illuminating the interplay between stasis and movement, thus returning cinema to its scientific and mechanical origins in phantasmagoria, chronophotography and optical devices.

An illustrated catalogue, the first major publication to comprehensively explore the reciprocal interactions between film and visual art in the postwar period, will accompany the exhibition. It will feature commissioned essays by prominent film scholars and art historians.

"Hall of Mirrors" will tour the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University in Columbus from Sept. 13-Jan. 5, 1997, and the Museum of Modern Art in Chicago from Oct. 5, 1997-Jan. 4, 1998.