Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Artist Statement – “Untitled”

Brooke Bolding and Jackie Rosen

Our video explores societal attitudes towards mental health, and how those attitudes inform our relationships to people with radically different ideologies.  Othering and mental health were our collaborative focus, both of which pertain to themes of justice.  We collaborated through all aspects of our process, thinking to with a way to represent our topics.  We decided to integrate a newsreel style into our video in order to historicize the treatment and misrepresentation of people with mental disorders.  By then shifting to a more experimental approach, we hope to call attention to the way attitudes about mental health, while seemingly evolved, are still out of date.  The attitudes about mental health inform the language people use all the time when describing people who think very differently from them.  Our video is a radical adaptation of our combined essay.  The modes of representation we employed are primarily performative and reflexive.  We call upon the cultural icon of Nurse Ratched to establish a frame of reference for our audience, which we later challenge.  The most challenging aspect of this project was representing our message visually.

We met because Albert told Steve his old North Face backpack was really fresh.

“Fresh?  You mean like it smells bad?”

“No man, it’s cool.”

Steve looked it up on the web.  Origin: 1980’s NY hip hop, “highly approved by someone”.   Cool, if outdated.

We talked.  Albert’s a 20 year old Muslim who grew up in Yakima.  Steve’s an agnostic who grew up in Ellensburg.  He’s turning 70 a couple weeks after we write this Artists Statement and post it with our video on the blog.  Neither one of us knows jack about blogging, but we guess we’ll learn, as with so much else in this class.

We asked ourselves:  How can a committed Muslim and a committed agnostic work toward mutual understanding?  The question wasn’t “Can we?”  But “How?”   The answer was:  Make a film together about our beliefs.  Do it with good will and respect and we’ll be working toward mutual understanding in the world.

Albert told Steve about Islam, took him to the Mosque, showed him how to pray, talked about heaven and hell.  Steve told Albert about agnosticism—not always easy, because despite being one, he doesn’t often try to explain it in detail.

Our styles are very different.  Steve’s a writer, Albert is a texter.  Albert jumps right in, Steve gets nervous if he doesn’t have a plan.  Albert doesn’t give a rip about recycling; Steve does.  Steve doesn’t give a rip about Hell; Albert does.

But we both do art, we both make music, and we both try to follow the Golden Rule.  We learned a lot making the video, about each other and ourselves.  We spoke openly and listened closely, gradually fading out the debate impulse, cranking up the dialog.  We’re not expecting any big conversions, in ourselves or in the other person, but we’re seeing changes we like.

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Artist Statement

Laberinto

Topic: Our short film Laberinto deals with issues of consumerism, over production, commercialism, and the resulting waste.

How we Addressed S and J: Our film mainly addresses the theme of sustainability. We paralleled this them with images of consumerism and commercialism.

Group Process: Using scripts and location scouting, we determined where we would gather most of our footage, but we hit our stride during digital editing.

Nature of Adaptation: Radical/Experimental

Mode of Representation: Reflexive, Poetic, and Participatory

Stylistic Approach: We decided to experiment with vertical montage, using both dialogue and music, to weave together a cohesive piece of video.

Biggest Challenge: Finding ways to work around time constraints and planning for the unexpected. Also, creating a final piece that makes sense and flows.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Brian Pizzi
Mellisa Funk

Our topic involves how a binary gender system is presented to us, and how this shapes our societal concept of a default gender.

In the terms of sustainability and justice, acknowledging that as a culture we have adopted a  binary gender system in which males are portrayed as the most normal begins a process in which we can acknowledge individuals disenfranchised by that binary gender system.

The adaptation of our essay intends to present instances in which being given an assigned gender negatively impacts our emotional development as humans. In many ways, the disenfranchised become powerless toys for a society that does not care to acknowledge systematic abuses that might inconvenience day to day life.

The primary mode of representation we used were performative. We talked a lot about how to represent what we were feeling about our own involvement in sustaining a binary gender system, and we also talked about how to record the concepts of isolation, powerlessness, and compassion without taking advantage of anyone. We tried to incorporate instances of reflexivity to acknowledge our role as filmmakers, knowing that a lot of the rules we learn about gender are taught through media. Taking a more poetic license with the piece gave us leeway to experiment with video editing and conceptualizing the piece, which turned out quite different from our film adaptation.

The most challenging aspect of this collaboration was trying to pare down what we wanted to say, and figuring out how to say it with moving images. Finding a voice and learning how to use it effectively are two separate things.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ninette Rincon
Meskerem Johnson
Catherine Michaelis

Artist Statement for Bitchin’ in the Kitchen

We share our cultural foods, stories, and struggles with our community. As individuals we decolonize ourselves by finding our roots, and sharing what we learn with our community. We create a safe space so we can continue on our healing journeys to strengthen and better ourselves, and our communities.

Over several lunches we talked about our relationships to food, family, and culture, and then realized we could create our video in the same way – sharing food and talking about cultural connections to what we eat.

Our script adaptations radically changed from our original essays, as we created internal dialogues about food and our cultures. We became performative and reflexive in front of the camera, then we edited our footage and audio together. We played with vertical montage to reflect the ways in which we can’t always express how we feel. We altered opacity and film speed to show how time and space alter when we’re together with friends.

Most challenging was the time limit and the learning curve with Premiere Pro.