Cunningham, Alex, 2016

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From the subseries: Creative Theses, 2016

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From the series: MFA/EDA Theses, 2016

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Western Disturbances, and Ice Brought down from the High Mountains. This collection includes a digital file of the video documentation of the performance Multimedia documentary Western Disturbances, which premiered at the Full Frame Theater in Durham, NC on April 16, 2016, as well as the original source video file for the performance. It also includes digital transferred video files of the four 16mm films that premiered as part of a collection called Ice Brought down from the High Mountains on April 17, 2016. The titles of these films are: twentyfive, Raining Ragas nos. 16, Borderlove, and Zeniths and Nadirs: the oscillations of beginning and so always.

Cunningham's abstract: "The project Western Disturbances began as a fairly convention documentary project focused on the Indian Monsoon. However, while spending the 2015 summer in India attempting to document the rains that never came, the project shifted focus. It became a project about the specifics of the 2015 monsoon, the personal struggles in the making of the film, and the general ideas of failure, expectation, anxiety, and patterns. The end result of the project is a live documentary performance film. The film is narrated by the filmmaker live in the theater, and includes different media (including VHS played on a VCR/TV and 16mm footage projected) as well as objects and props such as newspapers, books, and lamps that give the film the feeling of a stage production. The expanded and chaotic physical nature of the performance creates an experience essential to the viewing of the work.

Ice Brought down from the High Mountains is a collection of four short 16mm films shot, edited, and projected on film. The four films chart the formal, thematic, and stylistic evolution of the artist over two years. Experiments with structure in filmmaking run parallel to the ideas of uncertainty and instability explored in the works. twentyfive is an camera film of 100 feet of film with superimposed text. Raining Ragas nos. 16 is a silent, in-camera rhythmic film which was made to help induce the beginning of the monsoon rains. Borderlove is a black and white handprocessed dissonant love and travel metaphor film narrated by an alien colonialist explorer. And Zeniths and Nadirs: the oscillations of beginning, and so always is an attempted documentary of the birth story of earth and of the human psychology, including footage of volcanoes, frozen waterfalls, and the night sky."

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