Saturday, September 21 at 8 PM

Doors 7:30 pm; $5 admission

The artists in this program laboriously produce films one frame at a time. Using varied processes — such as DIY pinhole cameras, direct animation, re-photography and photochemical manipulation – these films survey cinemas unique ability to look at the past and explore the phenomenon of time, memory and loss.

All films are shown on 16mm.

The Program

It’s a Baby! (7 minutes, b/w, 16mm, silent)

An early encounter with one who was already a big part of my life, and who would only get bigger! And in this case, all sizes are the best. Captured on a homemade pinhole camera.

Corn Mother (6 minutes, color, 16mm, silent)

A single cartridge of Super 8 captures my mother’s last visit to her garden. Her body is seen slowly dissolving towards illumination, while her image is forever immortalized in light and silver. Poem borrowed from the Wabanaki creation myth of the first woman, The Corn and Tobacco Mother.

Wake (7.5 minutes, b/w, 16mm, silent)

Wake is a dirge in celluloid. It is a celebration of my father’s life, a meditation on his body and a visual record of mourning. When my father died, there was never a chance to see his body after life had left it. This film was made by placing his ashes directly on 35mm film in a dark room and moving the film a frame at a time. What we see in this process of photograming is not the object in the photographic sense, but instead a representation of the space surrounding an object. The photogram is a shadow charting the distance between things.

Quaker City (3.5 minutes, b/w, 16mm, sound)

Pressing cider on the Quaker City Land Trust in late fall 2009. Film processed on location, in a root cellar, with hand carried water and sunlight. Print and optical track made by
hand. Soundtrack from The Ethnic Folkways Library, Music of the Ukraine.

Helios (5 minutes, color, 16mm, sound)

Time-lapses of cacti and succulent over the course of a year. Environmental data drives the tone and filtration of the sounds while the rising and setting of the sun illuminates the growth of plants moving in and out phase with one another.

Harbour (15 minutes, color, 16mm, sound)

HARBOUR is a 16mm film focusing on the English Fascination with the Pacific Northwest. It evaluates ecological simulation and historic recreation to find in Landscape a stage for the enactment of the Other. In the 19th century English aristocrats where especially fascinated with the large evergreens of the Pacific Coast. Entrepreneurs and naturalists began importing spectacular trees, such as the California Redwood, throughout the United Kingdom. This importation of fauna was part of a circuit of appropriation through recreation; where the English simulated, in garden and greenhouse, the ecology of colonial landholdings while exporting English culture and architecture to said colonial locales.

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