Produced while I was living in Washington DC. This is a meditation on highway architecture and the view from moving cars, subjects that have long been dear to me. Shot on Hi8 with footage processed at ETC and in my studio using the Amiga computer.
I was fascinated by the photos on gravestones in the Cemetery at San Minato in Florence, Italy. I began to think about the way in which a single image came to represent the entire lived experience of the person. Cinema as a whole also seems to be about representations of actions. I wondered about trying to film an experience directly lived as opposed to being represented. "I Morti" presents four streams of diary footage, images of daily life and travel. Collected over a 4 or 5 year period, these function as a counterpoint to the images of the dead on the fifth screen.
Collaboration with Poet/Performer Enrique Aviles. This video has its origins as a part of the “video set” for a performance by Aviles, directed by Davis Chung. In the theatrical piece Aviles played the roles of two immigrants to the US (one Mexican and one Korean) who live on opposite sides of a rooming house in the Adams Morgan neighborhood in DC. Subsequently, Aviles and I decided to create a stand alone video using one of his poems. The original footage of the neighborhood was supplemented with images of graffiti he produced and a shot of him reciting the poem in the backyard of his house in Arlington, VA.
The term "palimpsest" refers to a text which has been written upon two or three times, but whose lines have been imperfectly erased, so that different layers of all the texts are visible and mix together.
A precursor to "Megurs Ehd Ffleweh Bq Nsolst." Shot in the backyard of my house on Riddle Rd in Cincinnati, and upstairs in my studio. The hibiscus flowers take about an hour to open starting just at daylight. The flowers were filmed in realtime and subsequently sped up.
Performance organized in conjunction with Passages, my one-person show at the Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati.
Suzanna Barnes (violin)
Regan Brown (winds & autoharp)
Zach Larabee (percussion)
David McDonnell (electronics & horns)
Loraine Wible (images)
Charles Woodman (images)
A meditation on the pleasures of observation. Image music and text weave in a multi-layer dance. Images built around a pre-recorded soundtrack.
Text: Jack Kerouac
Music: Michael Fiday
Image: Charles Woodman
Performers: Carla Kihlsteadt, Graeme Jennings (violins)
Narration: Matthias Bassi
One of many attempts on my part to capture the magic motion of Aspen leaves, a fascination deeply embedded in memories of my childhood in Colorado. This footage was shot near Caribou, Colorado. The tape includes three different “episodes” which use a series image treatments and tricks, which further complicate the already complex motion of the leaves. The slow rate of change is such that no causal viewer will ever grasp the true dimensions of the work, beyond the surface image. This is a video which truly needs to contemplated as if it were a painting, installed in a space where it can be subjected to repeated viewing over a long period of time.