my work at
bear's mill comes down next week, and i've spent the last month or so re-imagining its installation for the next show. bear's mill is a cool place. it's an old mill and the inside is very rustic, woody, earthy and warm. very unlike galleries, which tend to be cold and vacant feeling. its next stop will be in a couple of weeks at
Artists' Own, my co-op gallery in lafayette, which has a more traditional, rather dim, pretty cold feeling space.
my work is almost always a work-in-progress. rarely do i not re-approach something that i've already shown and alter it before i show it again. so i'll be recombining all of the elements from
midwestern landscapes into something new. and i'll be including a new element as well. for the past 6 weeks or so i've been creating a short film to go along with the installation, and i think i've finally come to a stopping point with it. the film is an animation using a collection of photographs, live action, stop-action and cartoons to depict the atmosphere of the midwest in the cycle of a day through the cycle of the seasons.
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| screen shot of the bee cartoon drawn on top of the flower photo |
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| screen shot of the cartoon of a girl skating on the flooded river at sunset |
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| screen shot of cartoon of l-train in chicago |
it is called
midwest existential and it runs about 19 minutes. i use the term "existential" in the sense of beckett's play
waiting for godot, in that hopefully-hopeless-everydayness that is the midwest.
this is not the first time i've included a film element in an installation.
county fair and
post-industrial also include film elements. but this time, instead of the installation containing small video screens, i'll be projecting this film onto an assemblage surface to alter the depth and surface of the imagery. this film is also more of a feature part of the piece. i worked very hard to record and piece together an eclectic soundtrack of music and sounds that give the film a good portion of its life. and i want that element to be effective. so the film will be more like a chapter in the book as opposed to a page in the chapter. the next two weeks will be spent re-constructing everything before installation.
check out this short
cafe clip:
Good luck with that Zach. I have never been to the USA let alone the mid-west but often have the view it must have large open spaces and a feeling on smallness for the viewer. It is interesting to see your little touches to the photographs. Their hand-drawn aspect makes them all the more human.
ReplyDeletethanks so much bella. and yes the midwest is wide open, my wife and i often joke that we can see the curve of the earth over the empty fields in the winter.
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