October 17-23, 2002

VISUAL ARTS

The Visiting Artist Lecture series presents visual artist and experimental
filmmaker Dana Plays. Marty Demarest

Filmmaker Dana Plays

When you mention the term "the arts," imaginations are often instinctively drawn
to images of paintings, drawings and sculptures. A little bit more thought, and
music, dance and theater will often enter into the general concept of "the arts."
Writing, architecture and photography usually get tucked in as well.

There is, however, a medium that regularly incorporates elements from each
of those artistic realms: filmmaking. The process of transferring artful images
from the real world to celluloid simply seems like enhanced photography. But
when those images are applied to a blank screen — or a canvas, if you will —
the photography begins to resemble painting. Sound, arranged by the artist,
draws us into the realm of music, and the movement of images over a period
of time is suggestive of the way that dancers transport themselves across
a space. It's as if the 20th century, rather than creating a form of artistic
expression out of nothing, yielded a single medium that would contain all
other artistic media — filmmaking.

A scene from Dana Plays' experimental film Nuclear Family,
showing animals interacting with each other.

These connections are what will be explored as part of the 2002-03 Visiting
Artist Lecture Series, Artists and the Moving Image. Initiated several years ago,
the Consortium for the Visiting Artist Series, composed of Eastern Washington
University, the Northwest Museum of Art and Culture and Spokane Falls Community
College, has regularly brought to the community both national and international
artists whose work is challenging and inspiring. By focusing on moving images
— in film or video — the series is acknowledging the role that those media play
in the art world today and offering Spokane audiences the chance to encounter
one of the visual art world's most engaging forms of expression.

"We thought that they were so much a part of the visual arts," Lanny DeVuono.
A professor at EWU and member of the Consortium , DeVuono says "they're a
seamless link between the computer, sculpture, painting and performance. And
so we thought that it was our responsibility to remind ourselves about film and its
connection with the visual."

To initiate this year's series, the consortium will be presenting artist and filmmaker
Dana Plays, who will speak three times this week.

"I think what is important about Dana's work," explains DeVuono, "is that it's a link
between the older experimental filmmakers like Stan Brakhage and Maya Deren,
and the newer, memoir-style work that's being done by artists like Abigail Child.
Dana is in dialogue with those two different groups. It's still experimental, with all
of the characteristics that go with that, like abstract visual imagery, yet it also has
these concrete ideas that are very close to a narrative. You can follow a story, or at
least an idea in them. And that's what's fun about good film — you get this incredible
visual information, and you also get this sense of a story as things come together over
a period of time."

The process that DeVuono is describing becomes clearer when Plays describes one
of the films that she'll be presenting next week. "It's called Nuclear Family," Plays says.
"It's a short experimental film that's a compilation of found footage that documents
science experiments on animal behavior in the 1950s. Essentially what happened is that
in 1996, a university decided to throw away their educational film archives. So I pulled
about 100 films out of the dumpster, and used them here. It's also cut in with optically
printed, more abstract film in black and white that I've shot."

Plays describes the abstract, visual parts of Nuclear Family as representing "the
personal memories that we have. And it's placed in conflict with the scientific images
that are from the cultural memory bank. The film is called Nuclear Family, but you
never see a family. You see mannequins used in above-ground nuclear testing
experiments. And you see animals interacting with each other in boxes, while
authorities with triggers are controlling them. And the animals do stuff that
would be representative of love and aggression or sibling rivalry in the families."

This juxtaposition adds up to a much more controlled, choreographed experience
for the viewer than would have been possible in a gallery setting. In film, she's
able to present the images with an element of artistically shaped time. The result
is the same thing that a novelist, switching from character to character, can achieve
with fiction; or that a composer, moving sound around an orchestra over the span
of an hour, can create with music. But when the basic building blocks are images,
the result rests somewhere between these artistic worlds — the space inhabited
exclusively by film.

Dana Plays speaks on Tuesday, Oct. 22, at noon at EWU Art Auditorium, and
also on Oct. 22 at 7 pm at the MAC Auditorium. She also speaks on Wednesday,
Oct 23, at 11:30 am at SFCC's Spartan Theater. Free. Call: 359-6996.
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Article from The Spokesman Review