By Foot-Candle Light
A walk through the proscenium wings. You close your eyes and suddenly it is dark.
Mary Helena Clark
Also Directed by Mary Helena Clark
“Using footage from Cocteau’s Orphée, Clark optically prints an interstitial space where the ghosts of cinema lurk beyond and within the frames.” – Andrea Picard
A spy film, built on the bad geometry of point-of-view shots.
“Henry James had his figure in the carpet, Da Vinci found faces on the wall. Within this Baltimore wallpaper: a floral forest of hidden depth and concealment, the hues and fragrance of another era. Surface decoration holds permeable planes, inner passages. There emerges a hypnotic empyrean flower, a solar fossil a speaking anemone, of paper, of human muscle, of unknown origin, delivering an unreasonable message of rare tranquility.” – Mark McElhatten
An impressionist sea ponders the movements of creatures, seeing them in its dreams like dots swimming on its surface, carried along by the waves that slow the immense motion of its waters.
Scraps of text gathered from molding filmstrips and peeling chalkboards are photographed and intercut with pinhole shots from a schoolhouse.
For Dreaming the Dark: hands that see, eyes that touch, Ana Vaz invited artists and filmmakers whose work trust cinema’s capacity to transform relationships between the body and the camera to propose works that will engage with both perception and embodiment. Could cinema be an art of embodiment? By what rituals and actions could vision become tactile?
Pivoting between two stories of women and their relationships with objects—a Swedish woman’s marriage to the Berlin Wall, and a suffragette’s hatcheting of Velásquez’s The Toilet of Venus—Mary Helena Clark’s Exhibition is a maze-like tour through images and artifacts, a dense cryptography of the forms and objects that hold us in.
An interconnected look at tradition, colonialism, property, faith, and science, as seen through labor practices that link an endangered salamander, mass-produced apples, and the evolving fields of genomics and machine learning.
Experimental short about a man and some trees.
In this elliptical audiovisual diary, cinema’s extrasensory capacity is given surprising form. Here, what we see (the human throat, Gothic statuary, digitally generated furniture) often contradicts what we hear (birdsong, tightly wound rope, lithophonic stones), but the combined effect speaks to a utopian and universal ideal of filmic language.