Swan’s Island

Swan’s Island

2005 · 5 min · ★ 10.0

Katy Martin paints directly on her skin, and uses her whole body to make marks with the paint. Bill Brand frames the action and its trace, in the process, linking painting and cinema. Swan's Island explores gesture in painting, and how it relates to the hand held camera. The film creates abstractions from the glistening blue paint that in turn evoke a seascape or a distant, yet intimate place. In its choreography, Swan's Island is a duet. The painted figure occupies space, and the camera describes that space. The person filming and the person filmed are moving as one, and yet they are separate, each an island. Seeing and being seen are inextricably bound with emotions of love and loss, longing and a sense of place.

Directed by Katy Martin

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Swan’s Island

Thomasine & Bushrod

Both from Katy Martin.

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Skinside Out

Skinside Out · 2002

Skinside Out features paint on skin, carried out in an expressionist mode on both of the filmmakers' bodies. The emphasis is on the pleasure of looking -- at the edge of repulsion -- and the implications of making public an essentially private gesture. The film posits painting as a gendered, bodily act, whose location shifts continually within a context that's always changing. Images filmed in the studio are juxtaposed with footage of a construction barge along the Hudson. By examining both in relation to surface, the work paradoxically looks for what lies within, while questioning who and where we take ourselves to be.

Thomasine & Bushrod

Thomasine & Bushrod · 1974

Thomasine & Bushrod

MovieActionCrime

A pair of thieves operate in the American South between 1911 and 1915, stealing from rich, white capitalists, and giving to Mexicans, Native Americans and poor whites.

Hanafuda / Jasper Johns

Hanafuda / Jasper Johns · 1981

Hanafuda / Jasper Johns

"HANAFUDA observes the artist, Jasper Johns, and the master Japanese silkscreen printers at Simca Print Artists, as they created three different images from Johns USUYUKI and CICADA series. For me, the camera was a pretext for an in-depth apprenticeship. The finished film recapitulates my process of learning, gleaned over time, as I observed Johns and the printers at work. What I wanted to know was how one generates a work of art and, for that matter, what is art, what work is involved, and how do ideas as opposed to physical labor drive the decision making process. The films became a meditation on art and craft, as well as on the dialectic of mind and body, concept and actual work." -Katy Martin.

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