One More Lap

The Swimmer continues to take a lap in micro-cinemas down the west coast. These micro-cinemas form a river that lead to a place... some place called home. Next stop Other Cinema, May 26th!

Pools in Winter

If you are familiar with my films you may have noticed a recurring theme of water in many of them. One reason for this may be that I grew up next door to an Olympic- sized swimming pool in Tacoma Washington, and spent a lot of time there. One of my memories was a ritual where my brother and our neighbor Scott would jump the fence every spring before the pool was open to the public and be the first ones in for the year.  Scott who would later become the first drummer for Soundgarden would do this sneaking in style, and do a glorious jackknife off the high dive.

Anyway, I did a series of drawings of this pool when it was empty in winter (the high dive was shorted around that time from 10' to roughly the size of the smaller ones).  I've been going through the artworks I made in the 80's & 90's and came upon these drawings made in 1987. They are unframed and made to be hung together, 35"x 26" each, charcoal on heavy rag paper. I am in the process of cataloging these works and might make a separate blog for them.  These are the last of a series of pool drawings and paintings done around that time. I'm trying to lighten my inventory, and if you can give a good home these drawings please let me know. You can contact me through my email- salise.hughes@gmail.com.

Erasable Cities

My film Erasable Cities will screen at Seattle International Film Festival May 24th, part of their ALT-Shorts program. Erasable Cities is based on text from Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities, and features like many of my other films erased film footage. Footage in this film includes fragments from Death in Venice, Don't Look Now, and Three Coins in the Fountain. The score is by Jason Staczek. In this film Jason also chose an erasure technique, erasing excerpts from the Dead Emcee Scrolls composed by Thomas Kessler and performed by the Arditti String Quartet. This is my most ambitious film to date and my longest at twelve minutes. The film also features narration by Jack Bennett as Marco Polo and Stan Shields as Kublai Khan.

Members of S.E.A.T. will give lectures of our work as well as an encore presentation of our ReAnimated exquisite corpse films at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, April 20th starting at 7 pm. in their cafe. S.E.A.T. members included: Drew Christie, Webster Crowell, Stefan Gruber, Salise Hughes, Britta Johnson, Tess Martin, and Clyde Petersen.

Experiments in Cinema v7.9

How to Draw Clouds will screen at Experiments in Cinema v7.9 in Albuquerque NM. The screening will take place on Tues, April 17th at the Guild Cinema starting at 6 pm.

The Perils of Boating

The Perils of Boating is a 4 monitor media installation that will be on view in the windows of 4Culture's E4C: Electric Gallery for one year starting April 5th. The work is based on reedited manipulated footage from F. W. Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans.

ReAnimated

On March 1st S.E.A.T. http://www.experimentalanimation.org/ will host an animation event during First Thursday in Pioneer Square in Seattle. We  will take over Zeitgeist Coffee with film projections both in and outside of the space. At the center of the event is ReAnimated- an Exquisite Corpse film made by seven of the members. Back in late December we came together to draw slips of paper from a hat that would tell us what image would begin and end our films. For example one of the prompts was Man with a Beard. The picture above shows that I ended my film with an image of a man with a beard and animator Clyde Petersen began his film with an image of a man with a beard. After we chose our prompts we were sworn to secrecy so we wouldn't influence each other. Now that these two films are finished I can show you an example of the prompts.