Rapunzel
(currently in post-production)
Director: Carol Sawyer
Director of Photography: Suzanne Friesen
Gallery Installation, Video
Arri Mini
2024
Funded in part by the BC Arts Council
Rapunzel features James Meger and Carol Sawyer improvising on the jazz standard ‘Ill Wind’, which drives the soundtrack for the entire installation. (Ill Wind was written by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler) The centre of the image offers a glimpse into a far landscape of forest fires, floods, and traffic jams, before the image is obscured by smoke.
Excerpt from Carol Sawyers' artist statement about this piece:
Grimm Future is a video installation comprised of three projected video tableaux vivant. Visually inspired by early 20th century illustrations of European fairy tales and 15th century “Netherlandish Primitive” painting, the videos employ no camera movement – each is a fixed shot, reminiscent of a painting. They are meant to be projected large, so that the figures in them are close to life size. The videos are just over 14 minutes long, and are intended to loop.
Grimm Future is my poetic response to recent and current events: pandemic isolation, war, climate change anxiety, increasing political polarization, the emergence of AI and algorithms that filter what news we receive, the proliferation of fake news, etc. All three Grimm Future videos are composited from multiple layers of still images and video that were shot separately. This compositing allows me to disrupt conventional camera perspective, and visually reference the types of spatial organization used in ‘Netherlandish Primitive ‘paintings – created before camera obscurae were widely adopted as drawing aides by European painters, and camera-based pictorial perspective in western painting became standardized and associated with ideas of ‘realism’. This visual strategy also could be read as a visual analogy for the ways in which we “piece together” our understanding of what is going on in the world from different sources of information.
http://www.carolsawyer.net/cs/work/work-in-progress/
