This is a film shot entirely on my cellphone. After recently moving away from Southern Suburbia for the first time, I wanted to explore the overwhelming, lonely, sometimes euphoric feeling when you don’t know anyone in the big city; sometimes longing for home, sometimes searching, sometimes dizzyingly happy. At 1:22 (added together to equal the number 5), this structural short incorporates a Matsuo Basho haiku. The film consists of seven different frames, another number significant for traditional haiku.
Fourteen Out and One Within
Textures: A Couple of Strolls Around My Neighborhood in the City of Brotherly Love
microwavesgoodbye
I love when I find treasures in books. I love it even more when I find them again after I’ve ‘hid’ them in other books. This collage is a combination of found images and images of mine found again. I’m surprised the one I put in the microwave is still intact.
Television Through the Viewfinder
This is a video I made with images I had taken using the viewfinder of a Polaroid Land 220. My quest is both ethnographic in nature, reflexive of my own reality lived and a visceral examination of the movement of the television screen as it remains such a constant pulsating extension in our homes, offices, schools, waiting areas.
A re-rendering of that experience by reconstructing the images captured into narratives provides some semblance of what I feel is the consciousness forever bombarded by endless visual constructs of self and national identities.
While capturing images, I am looking for moments that speak to me as overarching narratives in some way through other programming. I may also look for certain phrases that I feel need further exploration that become the status quo. I also find them visually fascinating as moments frozen in time of representations of humans, constantly changing as we are.
By freezing the moments of television and manipulating them in a variety of ways, I am blending meanings between and among images to somehow subjugate the dominant narrative and reclaim it for my own.
By pairing images, I give myself a way to speak back to the discourse.
By incorporating the cinemagraph of nature into the narrative of television, I am specifically speaking to the ability of certain discourses to be repeated to the extent that they are inseparable from the most basic of our existence-a permeation into the very core of our human existence on earth.
In reworking this narrative I also use jarring CSPAN sound-bites, speaking to the urgency of our times against the majority of our population, a danger that comes from and within high volumes of discourses steeped in archaic notions about hierarchy of man.
This is a video to be shown in large installation format, the white screen bathing the audience in light, reflecting ourselves as viewers. This is an ongoing project that I would like to experiment with presenting in various formats.
In Light: Work of Five Photographers, Todd Gallery, MTSU, May 2012
Ten Frames from the Lomokino
As a pre-graduation gift to myself, I opted for the new Lomokino. The loading mechanism takes some getting used to, but it’s one of those fun ‘hope for the best’ toys that can only get better with time. Knowing I’d be on the train on a one-day trip to Philadelphia, I decided to take it along. I finished the roll in-between classes at a friend’s house. Out of a roll of color film, I got ten successful frames. I took just an hour or so dropping those into final cut and adding some cheesy cinematic sound. At just 00:41 seconds, it’s just the meager beginning of what can only be a wondrous experience with the Lomokino.
Parallax
Fuji 6×7, color neg
Sawanee University of the South
par·al·lax (p r -l ks ). n. An apparent change in the direction of an object, caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight. You experience parallax when you look out of the window of a moving car and the trees appear to be moving.
Any way you cut it, fascism.
I rarely get to go to the theatre really. So, when I had a sitter for Herzog’s ‘Into the Abyss’, I took along my Fuji Instax. It’s a fickle little thing, but only because I dropped it once. I’m happy if I can get three out of ten.
everyday camera phone bath photographs
another perk of the modern world? tiny cameras. not that they provide the best tonal ranges or the sharpest quality (as a friend so eloquently keeps pointing out). but, what they do provide is the ability to capture in close quarters a formal perspective of what I feel is a common association.
there are moments that we spend over and over again in our lifetimes. for me, that’s alone in a quiet slightly bubbly, slightly more warm bath. that moment when you roll over on your stomach, dip your face in and come up to see the reflections in the water. when you wipe the dripping water from your face and everything you see, the water, the bubbles, the reflection, they’re all still moving by the force of your separation from them. yielding a camera in that moment without expensive waterproof equipment could be cumbersome, I suppose.
Also, I suppose I want the best of both the realist and formalist worlds. It’s important to me that the moment is real, but it’s also a moment that sparks associations to sound, memory, and fantasy.
http://cdn.hark.com/swfs/player_32x32.swf?pid=vwshkdxtyt&as=1
Hand Washing Clothes 01
bubble gum irony in gatlinburg, tn
Gatlinburg, TN
color film, 2011
As WordPress prepares to go dark to protest SOPA, I came across some street photography from Gatlinburg, TN that I wanted to archive. What better time to dive head first into becoming the master of my own domain!
Malina Chavez 