SENIOR I

I’m so glad the semester is coming to an end. The sun is out, trees are budding, flowers are blooming, and I no longer feel like I’m dying. Now I can turn my mind away from busy work and grades and focus on my real passions. Summer is the time when Riverwest comes alive. I’m so excited to show it in all its beauty. It’ll be a busy summer, but I’m up to the task. This is going to be the best film I’ve ever made, you’ve never seen a travel show like this before!

I’ve been thinking about doing a shoot all about books in Riverwest! There’s a crazy amount of those little free libraries in Riverwest and I think it would be cool to photograph each one. I could also check out Riverwest Public House’s indoor free library. There’s also Woodland Patterns. It’s not free or a library, but it’s a great little bookstore in Riverwest that always has some cool events going on. It may end up only being 10-15 seconds in my senior, but I think it seems like a cool way to explore my community.

The Riverwest 24 also has a lot of cinematic possibility. Hundreds of people race solo or in teams for 24 hours straight. The whole Riverwest neighborhood comes out to race or cheer people on. The sheer amount of people doing an urban ride is insane! It also brings a lot of business to local bars because riders can earn extra laps by doing checkpoints. Checkpoints range from grabbing free breakfast at a local church to singing karaoke for a minute in High Dive. I think it would also perfectly illustrate the bike culture in Riverwest.

This summer I plan to focus on the festival culture of Riverwest. I want to start with Locust St. festival, it’s really fun and vibrant and has a lot of live music and local vendors. I also want to cover Center Street Daze, another great local street festival. Even though I’ve cover a lot of the Riverwest Gardeners Market I’d like to get some stronger shots of that. I think The Night Carnival would also be really great to show. It’s only in its second year, but last year was amazing. They had fire dancers! Which I know will look super cool. Riverwest really comes alive in the summer and I can’t wait to shoot it!

Climbing by Jesses McLean never seems to have a start or end, it really does feel like it just keeps going even though it’s only 6 minutes. The mouse hand continues to climb and climb, the mountain visuals change, most notably the color of the moutains which are layered on top of one another. It keeps going and going, up and up, like the glorious uphill climb of life. As was so eloquently put, “What is your mountain to climb? Find the mountain; climb that damn mountain.” I like the duplicity of this installation, it is both simple yet complex. On first sight it seems simply to be multiple mountain images layer up, but in actually it has a very uplifting message right below the surface.

As if the color was looking at you, Sara Bonaventura, Italy, 2017, 10 minute, 3-channel video. This installation was so cool. It was really fun just zoning out watching it waiting for the screens to match up. It’s a triptych version of a choreography performed by Annamaria Ajmone, processed with analog synth. The video presents a body that has been triplicated and entangled in a network of exterior conditionings. I really felt this while watching, because each time gives a totally different feel depending on what’s going on around you. The color changes as the choreography changes.

Cloud of Petals by Sarah Meyohas was a video and virtual reality experience we had at the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival. It was really cool to be able to experience virtual reality, especially because the content was so cool. I’m really into anything floral so for me it was just very visually stunning. Shot on 16mm, Cloud of Petals traces beauty and subjectivity within the systems of automation and artificial intelligence. At one point a live python is let loose amid the piles of petals. Cloud of Petals is the most unique VR I’ve experienced.

St. Dionysus (2006) by Kehinde Wiley. Oil on canvas with carved and painted frame. Wiley painted this using a live model he met on the streets of New York City, a process he calls “street casting,” he allows the model to choose his own pose from a book or sculpture. This pose is from a sculpture of St. Dionysus in Rome, Italy. Wiley depicts the young black women and men in his paintings in the same hyper realistic style that historic paintings use, he seeks to raise questions about race, gender, status, and the politics of representation. The man in this picture wears the clothes of today to heighten our awareness of the absence of African Americans from historical and cultural narratives.