Sitting Still: Contemplation and Creation
Artists from Memphis, Tennessee and Syracuse, New York - including hundreds of first year college, and high school students - recorded life with their video cameras in tow. They helped me explore the value of beginning the work of making videos from a point of stillness. The small, mundane moments they framed, shared, and created in call-and-response fashion, provided a means to gaining empathy with one another. The videos were projected side by side in a split screen fashion at University of Memphis Museum of Art, in Memphis and The Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse. The stools pictured here were designed and built by University of Memphis architecture students out of cardboard and exhibited with the videos in Memphis. My gratitude to graduate photography student Danielle Mericle, who in her own way captured exquisitely framed videos from atop her unmoving tripod. The advice of Cheryl Oring, and early works of Bill Viola and Terry Fox, who found stillness from behind the lens of the video camera, have been inestimably helpful in developing this relational video project.
Project Funded By:
Kauffman Foundation Initiative Grant: Contemplative Arts and Society, Syracuse University
Center for Contemplative Mind in Society
Syracuse University Office of Sponsored Programs
Hendricks Chapel Wellness Initiative
Syracuse University Co-curricular Fund
Everson Museum of Art - New York State Council for the Arts Film Media Arts Grant
Project Funded By:
Kauffman Foundation Initiative Grant: Contemplative Arts and Society, Syracuse University
Center for Contemplative Mind in Society
Syracuse University Office of Sponsored Programs
Hendricks Chapel Wellness Initiative
Syracuse University Co-curricular Fund
Everson Museum of Art - New York State Council for the Arts Film Media Arts Grant