202. Phantom Canyon

This audio tour has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: NEH CARES. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this audio, do not necessarily represent those of the NEH. Transcript The first of the trilogy films is called Phantom Canyon. For this film I had the idea of incorporating the subjects from Eadweard Muybridge’s human motion studies from 1883. I was familiar with them from my years studying the figure, they are a resource for many artists since they show multiple images of bodies in motion performing various activities. I thought their stop-motion quality made them a natural fit with animation, and also that the male and female figures could become characters in a film that was a metaphorical examination of a relationship. I combined the figures with images from clip-art books which are collections of copy-right free images often used by artists. The bold contrast in the black and white images seemed to work well with the themes of passion and dismay that the film explored. From the very beginning the technique excited me. I began to create 3D sculptural installation objects in collaboration with other artisans after I finished my second trilogy film Night Hunter and created Night Hunter House. The excited response to that work made me think about returning to Phantom Canyon and thinking of a way to incorporate a key element of the film with a small scale projection built into a sculptural object. Stack of Beds emerged from that process. The falling beds are part of a seminal scene in Phantom Canyon and creating a physical representation of that scene seemed like a fertile choice. My friend, the fine woodworker Michael Schliske and I designed the piece together, and he fabricated it using various antique beds and other elements he built. I like the way Stack of Beds plays with filmic scale and extends the metaphoric power of the film by placing the viewer inside the filmic space in a certain sense.