Three years and dozens of screenings later, his most acclaimed piece, Vertical Air, featuring accompaniment by experimental jazz artist Wadada Leo Smith, was screened (2000), as part of "The American Century" exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The film's rich black and white images, often likened to Dziga Vertov's, span New York's cityscape and pay homage to a century of cinema and revolution, both personal and political. But Fenz's depiction of insurrection starts with his own work.

He states, "Film is the most fragmented of the arts, but the one that holds on most tightly to the literal." Transgressing that hold, he applies structured improvisation, found in musical composition, to the medium of film.

Influenced by musicians, Smith, Anthony Braxton, and Roscoe Mitchell, he allows underlying concepts to remain specific, yet open, to capture the random events of each day. Meanings are uncovered, through the editing process, and images are arranged to reveal original ideas in freely discovered moments. Sensitive to the balance of light, duration, image relationship, space, and their emotional weights, he produces lush images that breathe.

Beyond visual poetry, Fenz possesses a keen social and historical awareness. His most recent 16mm silent film series, Meditations on Revolution, reflects how a legacy of revolt remains in the present, evident in the rhythms of the back alleys of Latin America. Says Fenz, "Brazil is what Cuba may have been if the revolution hadn't occurred."

The installations, Part I: Lonely Planet and Part 2: The Spaces In Between, shot in Havana and Rio de Janeiro, consider that view.

Fenz believes that whereas Cuba is all about time, Brazil impacts the psyche, visually and spatially. Part 2 portrays the tightness of Rio and how class determines the demarcation of land. Weaving through corridors, he captures this stratification and the restiveness of an impoverished shantytown, locked between a mountainside and the city's wealthiest neighborhood.

To express this continuous, yet shifting, relationship between time and space, Fenz juxtaposes and superimposes rolls.

For a comparison, he suggests writer William Burroughs' collision of moments as an expression of consciousness and asks, "How can one represent the idea of walking through New York City, while thinking of another place? Or how do we go to sleep, wake up, but allow dreams to factor into our lives?"

The views expressed above represent the writer and not necessarily those of The Disinformation Company Ltd.