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BLOCK 4 FRACT(AL/URE)

PROGRAMMERS' NOTES: Refraction, reflection and recursion run as themes throughout these six films, referencing the razor-sharp edges of feeler gauge blades and their metaphorical activation of tenuously thin, perhaps hallucinated, demarcations.

Leonardo reflects on how we peculiarly slice up space using both satellite-level abstractions of Earth and his own body, and Matthew similarly reflects on how we slice up time by juxtaposing cosmic and human events in a cycling rumination. Both filmmakers ask: How do we make sense of the iotas of space and time we each occupy or claim?

In Anna's film, identities are fragmented, reflected and refracted, causing characters to lose their way; Gabriella's film brings this refraction out of Anna's surreal woods and into our media-driven hyperreality, where corporeal selves are disoriented and displaced by digital doppelgangers.

Mahedi further suggests that every interaction we believe we have with another is a just reflected and refracted interaction with our inescapable selves. 

Jamie, finally, speaks to a different horror: the faultlines in our mental and emotional health created by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Total run time: 29:07 mins

Image: Leonardo Pirondi, This is Mine, This is Yours (film still)

THIS IS MINE,

THIS IS YOURS

(2019)

Leonardo Pirondi

(Film/Video)

BIO

Do not take mine and I may or may not take yours.  A meditation on the unnatural lines drawn by human beings.

THIS IS MINE, THIS IS YOURS by Leonardo Pirondi
CRISES / THE CONVEX LENS by Matthew Pagoaga

CRISES / THE CONVEX LENS

(2021)

Matthew Pagoaga

(Art & Technology MFA '21)

BIO

The now can only be viewed as important – as critical – to time. Conversely, we know that in the grand scheme of everything, the now has little meaning or value. What is a year in isolation as compared to the billions of years that have come before and will again after? What is the lifetime of a person or a corporation or a rainforest as compared to the ever burning of the sun? These things can only be viewed through the lens of now, and that lens a magnifying sphere – a convex lens – distorting its beginnings and its endings to such brevity while amplifying, slowing, and enlarging this singular second, this minute, this hour, this day. 


Crises / The Convex Lens examines these notions, portraying four visual datasets of crises, while drawing aural and diagonal parities in sound and theme. Though these crises differ in time and immediacy, the now distorts them, condenses their ends, enlarges their middles, until they coalesce to a humming noise playing out in the backdrop of our collective now.

THIS MUST BE THE WOOD

(2017)

Anna Hogg

(Film/Video MFA '16)

BIO

One of three sisters becomes lost in the wood where things have no names. Its ephemeral shadow-light filters into the room of the other two, who search for her in their own reflections. It is a tale of sisterhood and the loss of sisterhood, quest and the failure of that quest. Its images are made through a series of long-exposure time-lapses inside a large camera obscura structure, and its text is based on a series of fictionalized real events and Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.

 

THIS MUST BE THE WOOD by Anna Hogg

ALL I HAVE

(2021)

Gabriella Mykal

(Film/Video MFA '23)

BIO

all i have is an ongoing series that explores living in a post-reality TV, digital wasteland, fakery, sincerity, and all. Broken down into three parts, the film uses personal and found footage, distortion, and automated confessionals to turn the gaze of the device back onto the user in an intimate reflection. The line between the device and the user begins to blur and they meld together to form an entirely new alter ego, curated exclusively for virtual spaces. As the performance bleeds back over into real life, the viewer witnesses the absurdity, hilarity, and tragedy of the user’s musings around her transformation from real to disassociated to hyper-real.

ALL I HAVE by Gabriella Mykal

YOU

(2021)

Mahedi Anjuman

(Art MFA '22)

BIO

YOU portrays the image of how we interact with or understand other humans, as our understanding is limited and developed through our own knowledge and perception.

YOU by Mahedi Anjuman

FRAGMENTS

(2021)

Jamie Naqvi

(Film/Video MFA '12)

BIO

This is a work-in-progress, a five-minute excerpt from what will be a slightly longer work. It explores how the pandemic has affected everything from our dreams to our overall mental health. In doing so, the film also allows “fragments’ of a personal narrative to emerge.

 

The film is based on some of the reading I’d been doing (articles, scientific studies) about the pandemic and some of its more “peculiar” consequences and was likely also inspired by some of the films I’d been watching; old horror films, documentaries, and experimental works by Guy Maddin, Deborah Stratman, and others.

 

Fragments combines “found” and original material – some of it highly manipulated – including stock and archive footage, animated family photographs, old movie clips, and recently filmed iPhone video.

 

A sort-of experimental mini-documentary in three parts (with each part corresponding to a different film genre), Fragments borrows from the video essay, horror film, mid-twentieth century educational film, and home movie in its investigation of the psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

FRAGMENTS by Jamie Naqvi
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