Here are some recent digital films for you to peruse:

Gizmo Kaleidoscope

Optical and mechanical – rotating, tumbling, reassembling, rearranging, arrested and in flux, loose and continuous – a view of Coney Island and its denizens in patterns of shape, color and sound. Multilayered and transparent, a lopsided ode to the place a local calls "like spending three minutes inside a ***ing pinball machine."

Support for this project provided by the Wexner Center for Arts Program, The Ohio State University.

©2010 Susan Shaw

Sibylline Fracture

As a part-time Atchafalaya Basin resident, I am very passionate about the waters of Louisiana. "Sibylline Fracture" is one artist’s response to the BP spill.

Its origin stems from personal experience. I was playing cards with friends in L'Anse Bleu, Louisiana on a beautiful spring afternoon when one of the players at my table received a cell call: a young family member had just been killed during the BP rig explosion.

At that moment we were unaware of the magnitude of the unfolding spill disaster, but what I experienced was a definite fracture in the continuum of life. We didn't know then that the fracture was also a foreshadowing of dreadful events to come, the Sibyl speaking.

The video synthesizes my Louisiana swamp footage, oil related graphics, and my sense memory of that afternoon.

Support for this project provided by the Wexner Center for Arts Program, The Ohio State University.

©2010 Susan Shaw

Michael's Snow 

"Michael's Snow" is a reference to two very different kinds of seminal events in my life.

The first has to with an art experience. I saw Michael Snow's experimental film "Wavelength" in 1967. In the film a camera zooms slowly from one end of a room to a photograph of waves on the wall at the opposite end. The zoom is accompanied by a sine wave, which gradually progresses from its lowest note to its highest while the image passes through color filters, different film stocks, and reverse exposures. I have never seen the film again, but it has always remained with me and deeply colors "Michael's Snow."

The second reference has to do with the emotional experience of sadness and loss, in varying intensities, proportional to the place in my life of the people I love and have lost or fear I might lose. 

When I made this film I thought it was about snow, but now I know it is about something more interior. It is about the winters of my heart.

©2009 Susan Shaw