Caitlin Horsmon: Experimental Works
Saturday October 15, 2005, 7 pm
UNO ART GALLERY
1st floor Weber Fine Arts Building, UNO Campus, 6001 Dodge

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Artist Statement:
Each of my films and videos presents itself to me as a momentary thought magnified and re-constructed in an audio-visual form. A persistent question worked out through images and sounds. My films and videos exaggerate the vagaries of the everyday – a grasshopper and a crow, a conversation in a bar, an accidentally filmed walk through a fairground until they grow into something more. In that process of transformation, I attempt to build relationships to larger questions of history, representation, an animated landscape, pleasure, gender and absence. I believe these themes work as invitations to interpretation, locations that are available, but not always translated. I hope that my movies give these invitations not in packets – easily controlled and emptied, but in more complicated strands and fragments.

Rather than a set of formal questions being worked out over a series of pieces, I think of the sound and image strategies in my films and videos as always in relationship to the ideas at hand. Some movies present themselves as films and some as videos – always I hope the form of the piece speaks to and supports it content. What I often find myself thinking about through film and video is the lost, the almost remembered, the invisible, the submerged or the ignored. My large project as I make more films and videos is to continue to think through the connections between media, form and concept and to make movies that stray from established vocabularies with enough precision to evoke the questions at hand.

Made in U.S.A, a site specific video produced as part of the Echotrope
artist in residence program

This site-specific piece designed for my upcoming show at Echotrope. In the tradition of early cinema’s strategy of doubling the theatre as a center of exhibition and a site of production, I plan to restage their technique – making a video about and at the site of the screening. For early cinema audiences, this appeal of this style of filmmaking was as a curiosity – the experience of seeing yourself or your neighbor represented cinematically provided a thrill. I’m interested in seeing how this very specific production practice organized around the possibility of representation plays out in contemporary culture. So the end product will be an experimental video that takes seriously the methodology of ‘the experiment’ – the outcome will depend entirely on the variables and constants at play. The content of the video will develop through the production process – I imagine a kind of theme and variation structure or a series of hypothesis beginning observationally but likely assuming additional modes of address (camera to subject) over the course of the project.

Text provided by Caitlin Horsmon