Columbus Moving Image Art Review

On Friday I attended the 14th Columbus Moving Image Art Review. The review showcases moving image works created by local filmmakers. The works ranged from abstract to narrative. The artists and work were as follows:

Matt Swift -- City Lights 
Lindsay LaPointe -- Rainboxes 
Vita Berezina-Blackburn -- Walker in the Field 
Nikki Swift -- City Walks -- 22 -- Boston 
Sean McHenry -- My Quiet Day 
Eric Homan -- Life-Lapse 2013 
Kevin Harkness -- Self Portrait Liz Roberts -- Flesh Suitcase 
Shannon McLoon - Bodyscape 
Franz Ross & Chris Wittum -- Spaceman 
Eric Hanson -- Writer & Red 
Andrew Ina -- Pastime 

The first two pieces featured hypnotic visuals set to music. City Lights wove together abstracted footage of the city to create patterns of light. Rainboxes explored the rhythm of falling rain.

Vita Berezina-Blackburn's piece, Walker in the Field, was especially interesting to me because I am currently taking a motion capture class taught by the artist.  Walker in the Field shows a ghostly figure walking among plant-like forms that represent places the walker has been and will be.  It is an interesting and thoughtful visualization of how the body moves through space.  

Several of the short pieces explored the rhythms and beauty in mundane life.  Life-Lapse 2013 by Eric Homan (who, incidentally, was my first 3D animation teacher) consists of time-lapse footage of every-day scenes from his life, including domestic scenes and his working life as a filmmaker and a teacher.  By compressing the day to day experience of life into a few minutes, we are invited to contemplate the actions we take over and over again in our own lives.  

Flesh Suitcase and Bodyscape were both meditations on the human body as object.  Flesh Suitcase offered many uncomfortable images.  As a vegetarian, I found the ending scene, which focused on human feet stepping on raw ground meat, to be particularly disquieting.  Bodyscape took a more glorifying stance to the human body.  This imagery in this film depicted the human body as an object for aesthetic contemplation.

Eric Hanson's Writer & Red explored the creative impulses that drive storytellers and the distractions which hinder them.  The Writer finds himself haunted by a story character he has created in his mind, but has not given form to in his writing.  Although the Writer is working towards his goal of being a creator, he has allowed the work he feels he should be doing to distract him from the work he wants to be doing.  The story is about the Writer reconnecting with his original reasons for being a writer and beginning the work he truly believes in.