Cobalt as the midnight sky when day has gone without a trace and we lie in each other’s arms eyes shut and fingers open and all the colors of the world pass through our bodies like strings of fire. -Marge Piercy To live inside a poem, in its continuance.
Fragments of unfinished verses swirl in an orbit, finding their way to each other, bewitched. They dance for a while, hand in hand, and then drop to the ground- to catch a breath, a smile, a moment in time; to sit together. Content. Then they get up to dance again before they say their goodbyes.
This 1969 experimental film by Joyce Wieland consists primarily of degraded footage of landscapes shot from vehicles moving across the country; meanwhile, 537 computer-generated permutations of the film's title appear like subtitles—the letters are scrambled repeatedly, Wieland skillfully intertwines elements of cross-country travelogue, political satire, and modernist experiment.
At the heart of Naomi Uman’s handmade experimental portraits and ethnographies are the folk traditions of the rural women in her host communities. Maintaining her vulnerability by not hiding her face, biases, or active participation behind the camera, Uman explores the intimacy of these women’s lives and joins their day-to-day activities, her camera focused on repetitive manual practices, agrarian ways of living, women’s work, and the intersection of ethnography, portraiture, and self-portraiture. Growing out of her previous work in Ukraine and Mexico, three sparks depicts life in northern Albania where the customary laws of the Kanun rule society. A trilogy-in-one, it begins as a meditation on Uman’s relationship with the country and an unwanted personal sacrifice that imbues her film with mythic, metaphysical implications. three sparks unfolds as a portrayal of village life and women’s gender roles before concluding with a self-reflexive video piece made in collaboration with the villagers, in a final abrupt shift.
Tucked away in the village of Alfred in rural western New York, the experimental film and media arts festival Light Matter has become “a major East Coast showcase for experimental film and video” in three short years. Spurred by a desire to bring together the often disconnected worlds of Film and Media Arts, curator James Hansen constructs thoughtful, eccentric programs that seek to create conversation between individual works, showcasing both emerging and established artists....
Valentina Alvarado Matos is a Venezuelan artist whose practice involves collage, film, and sculpture. In her films, the combination of manual actions carried out in front of the camera and poetic associations between words and images produce a reflection on the representation of landscape and memory. The films presented here combine play and correspondences of images with processes referring in turn to notions of diaspora, language, and ecology.
