Grant Phipps
Interior of MMoCA's video gallery, with cube seating, and video projected on screen.
The second floor Video Gallery is currently showing Bill Bedford's first-ever solo show.
Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA) is quietly, but steadily, building its identity as a downtown Madison cinema hub. Rooftop Cinema recently started a new summer season, and in the past month a DCP projection system — inherited from the UW-Madison's Music Hall — was installed in its lecture hall. It will be utilized for better resolution and surround sound for forthcoming art house fare and offbeat documentaries when a revitalized MMoCA Cinema launches in October.
Additionally, six abstract shorts by Bill Bedford are featured in the Video Gallery — selected by assistant curator for film and art video, James Kreul — through Sept. 6. The films in this exhibition, Bedford's first-ever solo show, can be seen as a supplement or primer to both the experimental-leaning Rooftop programs (through Aug. 20), and paintings in MMoCA's main galleries, including Paul Reed's Upstart (1966) and Charles Arnoldi's For Decisions and Revisions (1983). The paintings are part of the exhibit Extended Play: A Side, which runs through Sept. 27.
A continuous 39-minute loop allows guests to create their own distinctive viewing experience, or as Bedford frames it in an email, "contemplate one of [the films] individually or the entire series as a whole." While his short films have screened at various Madison venues for years, it's always been part of a broader collection of fellow Wisconsin filmmakers. With this exhibition, MMoCA encourages a newfound appreciation of his voice as a filmmaker. As Kreul notes, "Watching them as a series gives them a little more room to breathe, and even a first-time viewer can appreciate the repetition and variation of movement."
With his sincere smile and shoulder-length white hair pulled back behind his ears, Bedford is a familiar face in the local arts scene. He routinely submits work to the annual Wisconsin Film Festival and his five- to eight-minute films have often shown as part of the local experimental offerings (including in 2026 with Trip the Night, which is also part of this MMoCA program). He currently resides in Watertown, Wisconsin.
Bedford studied film and photography as an undergrad at UW-Milwaukee, before jumping over in the 1970s to UW–Madison for graduate school, where he earned dual master's degrees in those fields. During that time, he was a classmate of renowned experimentalist James Benning (Landscape Suicide), who became an influence on Bedford's work alongside Bruce Baillie, Hollis Frampton, and retired UW–Madison professor J.J. Murphy. Bedford has also been inspired by more conventional narrative directors like Yasujirō Ozu and Terrence Malick.
"I like to think of my work as 'moving, semi-moving, and non-moving pictures,'" Bedford says, finding shared space between his chosen mediums of film and photography. "Working in 16mm film, I made…'moving pictures.' And I used 35mm slides dissolving into each other to create an illusion of motion, or what I call 'semi-moving pictures,'" Bedford continues. "I treated those 35mm slides as film frames." Bedford also layers images in his 16mm works with projection and camera equipment, "as a way of linking film to still photography [the non-moving pictures]."
In the mid-1980s, MMoCA added four of Bedford's photographs to its permanent collection through funds from the Frautschi family and support from museum curator Janet Ela. The most well-regarded and his own personal favorite is the gorgeous precisionistic Winter Wall, taken in 1983, and part of a winter-spring series. Winter Wall was shot "at night with a 4-by5[-inch] view camera with a 10 minute exposure...after a fresh snowfall in the changing room of an outdoor swimming pool," Bedford explains.
The focus on subtly changing patterns of light and texture shows up in the six films of the Video Gallery program, made between 2017 and 2026. The oldest and first in sequence, the uncommonly compelling Ralph (2017), sees Bedford creating a spinning textured pattern on a metal platform with anti-skid plating that jumps with the rhythmic clattering and scraping audio of a passing passenger train. The "400" traveled 400 miles in as many minutes, the titular friend once told him.
Since that film was completed, Bedford has made increasingly abstract and minimalistic work, like the aptly titled Wavelength / Abstracted (2025), which seems to exist in a limbo of amalgamated digital and analog noise and fizzling, fireworks-like crackles. That is distanced from the manmade or natural worlds more plainly observable in the chain-link fence of Mort (2018), cornfields of Quagmire (2024), and even the vertically scrolling graffiti that imitates projected celluloid in the time capsule that is Report Card (2022).
In the latter, instead of using field-recorded environmental sound, which Bedford treats as an "equal partner to the visual image," he cues up a found audio diary of Carrie, a grade-school student. Her story intersects with Bedford's own, in discovering this abandoned cassette from the mid-197Editor's note0s decades later in a tape player at a thrift store.
While seemingly simple in presentation, Bedford's films and photographs offer much to ponder. "I especially like the idea that viewers have a chance to see a decade of my work," in this summer show at MMoCA, Bedford says. Though, when considering the scope of his career in the visual arts, his presence at MMoCA really crosses several decades.
[Editor's note: this article has been updated to reflect that Bedford currently lives in Watertown.]
