Artist Initiative Update 2

Preparatory stills for "Now I am become Death..."

This summer has been flying by, and I am frantically trying to catch up and get back on schedule. I have this week off from work, so I am treating it like a mini-residency, devoting many hours every day to the studio (or the MN Historical Society Research Library). I'm trying to get a handle on the bigger picture, as I'm feeling swallowed up by the minutiae and stumbling to find the next step always. At the same time, I'm trying to embrace the intuitive process that I know works best for me. I saw the director of Born in Flames (Lizzie Borden) speak at the Walker Art Center in June about taking 5 or something years to make that movie and that she just filmed and made decisions along the way, and it made me feel empowered to make this movie the way I work best - intuitively rather than so planned out and preconceived. Not that I need 5 years, though, hopefully!

experiments with green screens

So I'm concentrating on creating the images and trusting that I can edit them together in the way I want after I make them. Truely nonlinear editing.

I'm doing a lot of experiments currently, thinking about possibilities of taking the images beyond the confines of that little sheet of aged newsprint - such as tearing it, using green screen to insert archival footage into the torn bits, growing/shrinking its size, inversing the color of the images, trying out other methods like cyanotypes to make images - are they more radioactive looking? for certain scenes, and tinting the paper with watercolor, etc.

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experiments with inversing

I'm also hanging out at the MN Historical Society's research library this week and getting some more info on the stuff here in Minnesota - the power plants, the protests, etc. Which will hopefully prove fruitful.

Between my heart being in so many different places this summer - from Philando Castile's shooting north of St. Paul (who was a friend of a friend and a member of the educator community I am part of here) to the resistance to the oil pipelines in North Dakota and Minnesota to theclimate change caused flooding in Louisiana to the anniversary of Michael Brown's shooting in Ferguson and just so so so much more, it's been hard to stay focused. I've been distracting myself with screenprinting silly cat shirts and students' designs when it gets to hard to think about nuclear annihilation on top of all the above and all that's happening in the world and in my heart.

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screens from the 2016 T-Shirt Artists camp at the Science Museum of Minnesota

experiments with cyanotypes and photoshop