The Starry Messenger: Seven Artist Filmmakers
Marika Borgeson, Janine Davidson, Rebecca Meyers, Michaela Nettel,
Samantha Rebello, Talena Sanders, Ana Vaz
I only screen The Starry Messenger publicly on 16mm so that the black is
the actual absence of light, as opposed to the projected black of video.
(Marika Borgeson)
This show has evolved from an interest in the 'perceptual moment' of film, a
borrowed phrase that is intended to position filmmaking and film watching
as an expanded way of thinking in a visual language not limited by strict
rationality and simple causality, which engages with the materiality of film
as a manifestly analogue physical and chemical process. The seven selected
artist filmmakers engage with what is made visible and invisible in the
emulsion and grain and lights and darks of each unique celluloid print, and
explore the materiality of the film medium through physical manipulation of
film and alternative processes. This expanded understanding of the
analogue film-making process has run parallel to a growing awareness that
the survival of analogue film-making itself has come to resemble a campaign
for a critically endangered species – as film processing labs are seemingly
no-longer commercially viable and are closing – and so filmmakers, artists,
and critics across the world have had to come together to campaign for
institutional support to safeguard the ability to manufacture, shoot,
process, print, make and project film. At the campaign savefilm.org you can
add your support to the call for national and international organisations to
take active steps to protect the medium of film, and request that UNESCO
recognise film, the practice of filmmaking and film projection as world
cultural heritage. (Declan Sheehan, curator)
MARIKA BORGESON
The Starry Messenger (2013, 20 mins, silent, 16mm, USA)
It takes about 8 minutes and 20 seconds for the light from the sun to reach
the earth… A sun print refers to multiple printing techniques which use
sunlight as a developing or fixing agent... In the process of making the sun
print The Starry Messenger, a black and white 16mm film negative was
placed on undeveloped black and white 16mm film print stock and left in
the sun for days to weeks and then fixed. The sun was the only developer
used in making the film print. (MB)
Eleven Forty Seven (2013, 11 min, silent, HD video, USA)
Granite, metal, conifers, glass, and K-spar crystals. (MB)
Marika Borgeson born Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. MFA in Experimental
and Documentary Arts, Duke University. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
JANINE DAVIDSON
Two-Fountains, 2014 (2014, 2 mins, silent, standard 8mm + 16mm, IRE)
A visual juxtaposition of two outcomes, each one questioning the validity
of the other: is it beautiful? Is it useful? (JD)
Dunville
Fountain,
constructed
Belfast
1891,
&
Doulton
Fountain,
constructed Glasgow 1887 (both designed by Arthur Edward Pearse) shot
with a Standard 8mm camera on Standard 8mm film stock (which is 16mm
film stock re-perforated in order to be removed and reversed half way
through filming and so run twice through a Standard 8mm camera; after
processing the film is cut down the centre and spliced together to give one
roll of 8mm wide film for projection). For Two-Fountains, 2014, however,
the lab was instructed to not cut down the centre of this roll of 16mm film and so it is projected whole on a 16mm projector: making visible the
functions of replication and mirroring within the two redundant/restored
architectural structures, and within the analogue filming process.
Janine Davidson born Belfast, 1974. MFA in Sculpture at NCAD Dublin, 2012.
Lives and works in Dublin.
REBECCA MEYERS
Murmurations (2013, 6 min, sound, 16mm, USA)
Bird calls, a forest muffled with snow, the soughing of willows, the flutter
of wings. A reverie wrapped in fur. (RM)
Rebecca Meyers born 1976, New York. MFA in Film & Video Production,
University of Iowa 2001. Academic Film Programmer & Lecturer in
Film/Media Studies, Bucknell University Pennsylvania.
MICHAELA NETTEL
Aviary (2014, 4mins, silent, super8mm, UK)
The framing of landscape by/within man-made geometries, relationships
between camera (2-D) and physical (3-D) space; and the visual and poetical
associations between Modernist architectures and their more 'natural'
surroundings. (MN)
One of a series of the artist’s works, across 8mm film, photographic prints,
glass sculpture, and collage on paper, that explore the structure and
geometries of the Snowdon Aviary at London Zoo.
Garden (2012, 3 min, sound by Tom Simmons, 35mm slides & digital
transfer, UK)
Produced during an artist’s residency at Culpeper Community Garden in
London. Pairs of 35mm celluloid slides are overlaid and re-photographed to
create double exposure effects. These photos are then sequenced to create
illusions of movement. The audio is fabricated from soundfield recordings
captured over the course of 48 hours in the garden and neighbouring
locations. Guided by duration, flicker and time passing in the image, the
interleaved sounds reflect the process of double exposure and compose
distances between the photography and the bustling city around. (MN)
Michaela Nettel born in Bedford, England, 1983. MA Animation, RCA, 2007.
Lives and works in London
SAMANTHA REBELLO
the object which thinks us – OBJECT 1 (2007, 7min, sound, 16mm, UK)
The work begins, not with a concept, but with one or more mental images
and sounds, which are then composed and constructed through recording
and editing. The relationship between the object (to be filmed) and the
camera irretrievably alters the mental image with which the film began,
through becoming something unimagined. Likewise the editing process
effectively destroys the initial filmed image through forcing it into
relationships (with other images) which fundamentally change the way it is
perceived, through the formation of correspondences and potential
meaning. The process of perceiving / reading the images - and the mutable
space between the film and the viewer - is what the work is interested in
exploring. Meaning appears and disappears. The film exists in its rhythms,
intensities and signification where one is unable to part one from another.
(SR)
Samantha Rebello has been working in film and sound since 2004. She lives
and works in London.
TALENA SANDERS
Liahona (2013, 69 min, sound, 16mm transferred to HD, USA)
An experimental documentary, recorded on 16mm film, that examines the
culture, history, and lived experience of the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints; traversing Utah, Nauvoo and Carthage, Illinois and
Independence, Missouri, and exploring the balance and the tension between
the illogical and the pedestrian, the public face of faith and gaps in
accessibility, and how mysticism becomes mundane. (TS)
Talena Sanders born USA, 1983. MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts
from Duke University. Assistant Professor of Media Arts at the University of
Montana.
ANA VAZ
Sacris Pulso (2007, 15min, sound, 8mm & 16mm archival film & digital
transfer, Australia/Brazil)
Sacris Pulso departs from the deconstruction of another film, Brasiliários a film which interprets Clarice Lispector's chronic "Brasília" as her vision of
the modernist capital in 1962. Through the juxtaposition of Brasiliários
with a series of found footage, the film takes the form of a voyage of
remembrance and imagination, of a past and future dreamt between Brazil
and Australia. (AV)
Entre Temps (2012, 12 min, sound, archival images & digital, France)
A meditation and a reverie upon a city at once real and imagined.
Conceptualized as a documentary on a modernist housing estate, the film
has instead found form as poetic & expansive confrontation with the
psychogeography of a contemporary Europe in crisis. A requiem for a city
dreamt between its past and present. (AV)
A Idade da Pedra (The Age of Stone) (2013, 29 min, sound, 16mm &
digital transfer/post-production, France/Brazil)
"As artifical as the world must have been when it was created"
A voyage into the far west of Brazil leads us to a monumental structure petrified at the centre of the savannah. Inspired by the epic construction of
the city of Brasília, the film uses this history to imagine it otherwise. "I
look at Brasília the way I look at Rome : Brasília began with a final
simplification of ruins". Through the geological traces that lead us to this
fictive monument, the film unearths a history of exploration, prophecy and
myth. (AV)
Ana Vaz born Brasília, Brazil, 1986. Masters in Cinema and Visual Arts at Le
Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains. Lives and works in Paris.