Connections and Separations:
Personal, Psychological, Environmental, and Otherwise
Canady Creative arts Center
Bloch Hall Theater
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
The Silent Garden
Jonathan Onsuwan Johnson
Year: 2022
A child reads Edith Södergran’s “The Great Garden”, while moving image and sound wash over the words. A space is created to imagine beginnings and meditate on the potential of innocence.
Bio: Jonathan Johnson is a photographer and filmmaker whose work explores ideas about place, identity and nature. Autobiography plays a role in Johnson’s work as he often references his mixed-race background, travel and backcountry exploration. Johnson collaborates with composers, writers, poets, designers and fellow artists in his artwork that takes the form of photographic prints, books, films, videos and teaching projects. He has received awards and grants from Duke University, The Society for Photographic Education, CINECAFEST, The National Endowment for the Humanities and The Ann Arbor Film Festival. Johnson has participated in residencies in Costa Rica, Iceland and Sweden and regularly works in Thailand. His work has been shown at film festivals and galleries in over 30 countries including: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Modern Art Museum, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Galleria Sment, Braga, Portugal; Africa Centre, Cape Town, South Africa; Sofia Arsenal Museum of Contemporary Art, Sofia, Bulgaria; Center for Contemporary Culture Barcelona ; Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece; Union Docs, Brooklyn; Winnipeg Underground Film Festival and the EXiS Film Festival, Seoul, South Korea. Previously, Johnson was a competitive ski racer and held positions in the music industry and public affairs.
Run Time: 2:23
Country: USA
snails
Dorothea Braemer
Year: 2022
A dream about my mother and snails that my daughter interprets for me.
Bio: I am an interdisciplinary, socially engaged artist working with media, dollhouses, masks, social gatherings, cooking, meals and other activities that bring people together. I believe in art as a catalyst for positive social change and use video as an intimate language to explore the world around me. I am inspired by my family and pets, my students at Buffalo State University, my friends, activists, small grassroots arts organizations, climate justice initiatives, and going for walks.
Run Time: 4:05
Country: USA (New York)
Swalesong
Nick Jordan & Jacob Cartwright
Year: 2022
A sonic and visual exploration of a remote river valley in England’s North Yorkshire Dales. The documentary layers together place, people, history and nature, with the River Swale as a leitmotif. The film’s score was created by musician Sam McLoughlin (samandtheplants), who recorded his river harp in the current of the river. Swalesong combines location shots with archival material, including photographs by pioneering wildlife photographers the Kearton Brothers, along with historic audio interviews with local people who remember Neddy Dick, who was infamous for his musical instruments made from nature. Commissioned by Chrysalis Arts Development for 'Unfolding Origins' artist residency programme 2020-2022
Bio: Jacob Cartwright and Nick Jordan's collaborative practice is cross-disciplinary, encompassing film, drawing, painting, photography, objects, publications and events. The artists’ documentary films present oblique, layered narratives that explore social, cultural and natural histories. Cartwright and Jordan's award-winning films have been screened and exhibited internationally, including Innsbruck International Biennale (Austria); BFI London Film Festival (UK); Whitstable Biennale (UK); Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival (France); Sheffield Doc/Fest (UK); São Paulo International Short Film Festival (Brazil); Kassel Dokfest (Germany); Kurtzfilmtage Winterthur (Switzerland); Documenta Madrid (Spain). They are based in Manchester, UK
Run Time: 11:05
Country: United Kingdom
Profound Connection
Emily Taehee Kim
Year: 2022
Profound Connection that reveals the depth of nature through various microscopic structures. These express the relationship between parents and children who are physically separated for a long time but emotionally can never be separated, reflecting on the meaning of the umbilical cord in Freud's psychoanalysis. A digital microscope was used to capture complex forms of various withered plants to reveal the biological systems and visual arrangements.
Bio: Emily Kim is a Professor of Art in the Department of Art at Sam Houston State University in Texas. She is a digital media artist and experimental designer, who explores art, science, and technology. During the past years, Kim has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. Her works were exhibited in the Art Gallery at SIGGRAPH, Graphic Design USA, SMart Multimedia Art Festival, Florida International, Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences, 108 contemporary, West Virginia Mountaineer Short Film Festival, Farmington Museum, and Alexandria Museum of Art in the USA. Also, Kim’s works were included intentionally in the 10th Seoul International New Media Festival in Seoul and Gwangju International Exhibition at Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, South Korea, LED Media Fa√ßade in Selangor, Malaysia , Techfest 2013, Annual International Science and Technological Festival in Bombay, India, 9th International Conference Computer Graphics in Hsinchu, Taiwan, 3rd International Festival of Nano Art in Iasi, Romania, and 27th International Symposium on Electronic Art in Barcelona, Spain.
Run Time: 2:34
Country: USA
Beneath
Beth Walker
Year: 2022
A meditation on growth, connection, and symbiosis, inspired by the entangled lives of fungi. Recent years have seen a surge of research and collective curiosity around fungi. Particularly striking is the notion of the ‚”wood wide web‚”—the ability of fungi to connect plants and trees in complex underground networks.
Beneath is inspired by the behaviors of fungi, and wider themes of growth, connection, and symbiosis. Using experimental analog and digital techniques, the film takes its audience into a hidden world where edges blur, connection is vital, and life thrives through togetherness. Produced at the Royal College of Art, London, 2022.
Bio: Beth is a filmmaker and visual artist, who has recently completed an MA in Animation at the Royal College of Art, London. Originally from Nottingham, UK, Beth studied English at Royal Holloway University. After graduating in 2012 she worked for documentary screening organisation DocHouse, and initiated a side project, DocTent, which brought pop-up documentary screenings to music festivals around the UK.
Beth began her own filmmaking practice in 2014, focusing on projects with socially conscious brands such as Brighton Fashion Week and Good Money. She went on to work as in-house filmmaker for ethical travel company Responsible Travel. This role led to a two year period of travel and filmmaking in locations across Asia, Africa and Europe. Alongside commercial work, Beth developed her own creative practice, experimenting with a wide range of techniques. In 2019 she produced a solo exhibition for ONCA Gallery in Brighton, featuring collages, animations and an immersive installation. In 2022, she graduated from the Royal College of Art, London, with an MA in Experimental Animation, with her graduation film BENEATH premiering at London International Animation Festival.
Run Time: 3:42
Country: UK
Inventor Crazybrains and the Girl called Bird
Jefferson Everest Crawford
Year: 2022
We’re all on the brink of something…The objects found inside the house seemed of little historical importance - two diaries. But taken together, they form a fantastical little story‚ and so a filmmaker finds herself caught between fiction and memory, believing the impossible.
Bio: I grew up looking through a camera. My parents, both lifelong amateur photographers, probably found me more likely to borrow the camera than to pose for it. In my hometown of Gloucester, Massachusetts I was surrounded by art and commerce, plein air painters and fishermen. At Dartmouth College I finished my career as an athlete as I embarked on my career as an artist. I found mentorship in the form of independent filmmakers Jodie Mack, Samantha Davidson-Green and Nora Jacobson and began to learn the rules of filmmaking, and when to break them. I was invigorated by these filmmakers, and by producing hybrid-cinema shows in White River Junction, Vermont, and so my collaborators and I began "Inventor Crazybrains and the Girl called Bird," a magical-realist coming of age set in a pastoral past.
Run Time: 13:00
Country: USA
Miles & Kilometres
Sonali Gulati
Year: 2022
A lingering haiku poem of migration, separation, dislocation, and exile.
Run Time: 2:06
Country: USA
Bio: Sonali Gulati is an independent filmmaker, a feminist, a queer rights activist, and an educator. She teaches film at Virginia Commonwealth University's School of the Arts in the department of Photography & Film. She has an MFA in Film & Media Arts from Temple University and a BA in Critical Social Thought from Mount Holyoke College. Gulati grew up in New Delhi and has made several films that have screened at over four hundred film festivals worldwide.
Her films have screened at venues such as the Hirshhorn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and at film festivals such as the Margaret Mead Film Festival, the Black Maria Film Festival and Slamdance Film Festival. Gulati’s award-winning documentary film I Am was broadcasted on public television and cable TV in the U.S. and Portugal. Her documentary film Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night, was broadcast on television in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South Asia, and North Africa.
Gulati is a Guggenheim Fellow in the area of film and has received support for her work from the Creative Capital Foundation, Center for Asian American Media (CAAM), Third Wave Foundation, Tribeca All Access, and World Studio Foundation. She’s also won awards and recognition from the Robert Giard Memorial Fellowship, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, the Theresa Pollak Prize for Excellence in the Arts, and VCU School of the Arts Faculty Award of Excellence.
The Body is a House of Familiar Rooms
Eloise Sherrid, Lauryn Welch
Year: 2022
A magical-realist window into a man's experience of chronic illness, mixing paintings with live-action documentary footage to explore his inner world and relationship with his partner.
Bio: Eloise Sherrid is a Brooklyn based filmmaker and artist. Inspired by collage, she mixes genres and media at the intersection of fiction and nonfiction storytelling. Her practice is rooted in collaboration and her roster of co-creators includes painters, poets, academics, and social movement organizers. Her projects have been featured by Bad at Sports, DR√òME Magazine, and the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design, and been cited by The Guardian, Hyperallergic, and Print Magazine. She has contributed to Labor Notes and The Indypendent, and works as a video producer at Christie’s, where she tells award-winning stories about art and artists.
Lauryn Welch works and lives in Brooklyn, NY. She started her undergraduate studies in painting at Rhode Island School of Design, and finished her BFA in painting and drawing at SUNY Purchase College in 2015. In her paintings and installations, she explores how color and pattern are used on the body to express or conceal one’s identity in relation to one’s environment. Her current body of work takes a split approach between body and landscape, and is heavily influenced by naturally occurring patterns. Her work has been shown across the Northeast, and has also been featured in Art New England and New American Paintings.
Run Time: 10:00
Country: USA
Coalescence
João Pedro Oliveira
Year: 2022
Coalescence is the process of joining or merging of elements to form one mass or whole. In this visual music piece, both visual materials and music join and separate themselves in distinct units, forming shapes and sounds that are the combination of elements joined together.
Bio: Composer Joao Pedro Oliveira holds the Corwin Endowed Chair in Composition for the University of California at Santa Barbara. He studied organ performance, composition and architecture in Lisbon. He completed a PhD in Music at the University of New York at Stony Brook. His music includes opera, orchestral compositions, chamber music, electroacoustic music and experimental video. He has received over 50 international prizes and awards for his works, including three Prizes at Bourges Electroacoustic Music Competition, the prestigious Magisterium Prize and Giga-Hertz Special Award, 1st Prize in Metamorphoses competition, 1st Prize in Yamaha-Visiones Sonoras Competition, 1st Prize in Musica Nova competition. He taught at Aveiro University (Portugal) and Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil). His publications include several articles in journals and a book on 20th century music theory.
Run Time: 11:12
Country: Portugal
There, Where She is Not
Sarah Ballard
Year: 2022
Echos of a time in my grandmother's life that she no longer remembers—a fractured memory recollected through proxy figures Frances Farmer and Marguerite Duras—a mirror is a placeless place.
There, Where She is Not is a film attempting to recollect a memory of my grandmother’s that she could no longer access as a result of shock therapy. The film fails to remember but instead captures the affective resonances of her story through the surrogate figures Frances Farmer and Marguerite Duras. Repurposed interior design magazines, found footage, Farmer’s voice, text and image from Duras’ Destroy, She Said, and a half-assembled set collide as the piece reckons with reconstructing a woman’s psychic space in the 1950s.
Bio: Sarah Ballard is an MFA Candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her practice is concerned with the psychic aftermath of material histories, the ways systems of power manifest in bodies and landscapes, and how these reverberations can be traced through ephemera and common artifacts.
Run Time: 7:00
Country: USA
Circuit
Mats Landström
Year: 2022
A movement that starts and finishes at the same place. A woman is looking at old slides. The slides tell us nothing. These are someone else's memories. We see pictures from a bullfight, another of a woman in a roundabout, holiday pictures.
Bio: Mats Landström is a filmmaker, artist and sound designer whose work crosses medium. He creates soundscapes that together with film work together to accomplish a much larger whole. The aim of his work is to create audiovisual storytelling. Often the immediate surroundings can play the main role. Everyday places or situations can be given a completely different meaning. Mats has also worked with photographic series that reflects social and political reality.
Run Time: 5:15
Country: Sweden
Sun Coming and Casting a Shadow
Daniel Robin
Year: 2022
A film about time, memory, fear, and the challenges of holding onto joy.
Bio: Daniel Robin makes experimental documentaries that are often preoccupied with memory, personal relationships, and family history. His film my olympic summer screened in over 30 film festivals and won several awards including the Sundance Film Festival Jury Prize and Onda Curta Award at IndieLisboa. His film All The Leaves Are Brown also screened at over 30 festivals, including Curtas Vila Do Conde, Analogica, L’Alternativa and won the Best Director Award at the Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival. His film Petting Zoo has screened at 23 film festivals including Analogica and Ji.hlava IDFF. Daniel’s most recent film, Sun Coming and Casting a Shadow, continues in pursuing memory as an essential narrative theme and, like many of his films, was shot on super 8 and has screened at international film festivals including, Kassler Dokfest, Analogica 12, Kinoskop in Belgrade, Enguage Experimental Film Festival, Fisura International Experimental Film Festival in Mexico City, and the Atlanta Film Festival to date. Daniel Robin is a professor, teaching filmmaking at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia.
Run Time: 7:00
Country: USA
Pottero
Lindsey Martin
Year: 2022
APottero is a 10-minute, animated film based on family folklore and issues surrounding mental health, accessible healthcare and social mobility.
Bio: Lindsey's films are humorous, sometimes dark looks at the inner workings of families going through crisis, often embracing the absurd. Her interests are in locations and how humans connect to the places they are from; in cyclical patterns of generations of women living in poverty in rural America and the bizarre tactics individuals, especially young girls and women, design to cope with traumatic experiences.
Using traditional narrative structures as the initial framework, Lindsey mixes in changing visual modes through different animation techniques. The changes in mode allow the viewer to explore character’s complex thought processes.
Lindsey's work has screened nationally and internationally including the Slamdance Film Festival, the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, the Athens International Film and Video Festival, San Francisco Doc Fest and Cleveland International Film Festival. Her film, Every Speed, won the Premio Asolo Award for Best Film on Architecture at the Asolo Art Film Festival. Her films have also screened at various conferences and symposiums around the U.S. Lindsey received her BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and her MFA from Temple University. She is an Assistant Professor of Film Production at Ohio University’s School of Film.
Run Time: 7:00
Country: USA
electric moonlight & the language within the leaves
Takahiro Suzuki
Year: 2023
a modern re-telling of the japanese tale of the bamboo cutter and the moon princess. the moon princess listens to the untold intelligence of the cosmos as observed by the trees to become closer with and eventually return home.
Bio: Takahiro Suzuki (he/him/his) is an artist currently residing in Milwaukee, WI (USA). He completed his BA in Studio Art from the University of Virginia concentrating in the mediums of photography and cinematography, and received his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His work and research practices as an artist are a constant endeavor of questioning. Each investigation offers a path toward further curiosity, rather than an inching grasp toward certainty, where the end product is not so much a thesis upon which to land, but rather, an open hypothesis for the audience to consider. His works have exhibited and screened nationally and internationally. Suzuki also serves as the co-founder and co-curator of aCinema, a collaboration with Janelle VanderKelen that presents monthly experimental film screenings in Milwaukee, WI.
Run Time: 8:00
Country: USA
Two Cancers
Josh Weissbach
Year: 2021
Two Cancers that are simultaneously different and the same.
Bio: Josh Weissbach is an experimental filmmaker. He lives in a house with his wife, daughter, dog, three cats, and six chickens next to a once abandoned village.
His films and videos have been shown worldwide in such venues as Ann Arbor Film Festival, Slamdance Film Festival, European Media Art Festival, Mono No Aware, Chicago Underground Film Festival, 25 FPS Festival, and Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival. He has won jury prizes at Videoex, ICDOCS, $100 Film Festival, Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, Berlin Revolution Film Festival, and Haverhill Experimental Film Festival.
Run Time: 2:51
Country: USA
