HOME MOVIES: Personal Narrative in Artists’ Film and Video

The films in Home Movies invite viewers into the private worlds of the artists: domestic spaces, homelands, families, and interior lives. These artists take control of their own representations, often rejecting limited mainstream portrayals of their identities in favor of crafting more nuanced and authentic portraits of who they are and how they experience the world. The full range of human emotion pulses through these films, each artist transforming individual experiences into sensitive works of art.

The following films were screened on October 6, 2022, at the Broadway Metro in Eugene, OR, as part of the third screening in the time/space screening series curated by Julie Perini and presented by Eugene Contemporary Art.

The Home Movies program is presented below in a YouTube playlist, and is available for viewing until November 10, 2022. Read more about the time/space screening series here.

Program 

Deconstruction Via Train
Peter Christenson, 2015, 3 minutes & 10 seconds

Deconstruction Via Train is a series of video works fabricated mostly (from start to finish) while I'm traveling via train. The enclosed piece was produced and edited on ScotRail and National Rail trips throughout the United Kingdom. These videos are part of the evolving Dundonian Diaries cultural capital collection, a growing multimedia archive comprised of artist books, prints, animations, and films.

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The Walls Were Violet
Jenn Sova, 2021, 7 minutes & 19 seconds

A meditation on interiors, exteriors, and the shadows between them.

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A Rug That Never Dries Out
Ashley Campbell, 2019, 5 minutes & 45 seconds

A Rug That Never Dries Out subverts narrative and character tropes by focusing on visual imagery of the mundane, the background information gives a subtle but deeper understanding of a main character. The occupier of these spaces' presence is hinted at through diegetic sound, decoration, and blurry flashes allowing for new relationships to form between sound and image.

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No More Dope Parties
Cambria Matlow, 2019, 29 minutes & 5 seconds

Through a hyper-local landscape essay focused on a pair of trees in Portland’s deep southeast Lents neighborhood, the filmmaker compares her experience as an artist-parent to that of folk singer Woody Guthrie, who once lived blocks away. Guthrie’s lyrics celebrating opportunity for the family man play out against historical and cyclical forces of pioneer land domination, rampant, divisive construction, and homeless and indigenous displacement. While life as a mother challenges the filmmaker’s identity as an artist, truths about Guthrie’s personal life emerge that reveal a more compromised vision of a Western paradise than his lyrics would suggest.

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Untitled (portraits)
Jalen Thompson, 2021, 7 minutes & 18 seconds

This work is a visual meditation on black queer identity in Eugene during the COVID-19 pandemic. Communicated in a series of slow motion shots with references to black self-portraiture and black performance art, it asks the viewer to confront the reality of black queer identity.

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Call Me Back
Melina Kiyomi Coumas, 2019, 2 minutes & 38 seconds

Originally made just for family, the filmmaker uses the last voicemail left on her phone by her Grandmother in this experimental short that becomes a meditation on loss and haunted spaces. Footage was shot on Super 8mm film one summer upon returning home to Hawaii, a few years after her Grandmother's passing.

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Almost Always
Kerr Cirilo, 2022, 4 minutes & 12 seconds

Almost Always is an artist monologue that tries to make sense of the self through personal, affective rules that dictate one’s own personal navigation of the world. In making the private public, I hope to explore the interiorities of everyday life. It is an homage to my mother, a quiet rebellion against her, and an exploration of what (and how this ‘what’) dictates “how one should be.”