Film and Video
Katy Martin
BY NIGHT - NO STILLNESS is a study in black, where black becomes a radiant space within which one finds inner light. Taking its cues from Rothko's last paintings, BY NIGHT - NO STILLNESS homes in on the luminosity that emerges when you enter a dark place.
Dancer Miriam Parker and percussionist Hamid Drake perform within a video projection of a black and yellow painting, on Parkers body, by the painter/filmmaker, Katy Martin. The piece explores movement in relation to the painted gesture and fragmented, dreamlike sculptural space.
Camera/painting by Katy Martin
Dance by Miriam Parker
Music by Hamid Drake
Sculpture by Jo Wood-Brown
BY NIGHT - NO STILLNESS
by Katy Martin and Miriam Parker
2009, video, 10 minutes
Premiered at the Vision Festival in New York
SWANS ISLAND focuses on gesture in painting, and how that relates to the hand held camera. The emphasis is on the physicality of painting, and its visceral connection to memory and imagination. Here, the movement of the artist's hand is expanded to include the entire body. The film is about gesture as a kind of performance. Artist Katy Martin paints directly on her skin, and as she moves, leaves marks on the studio floor. Filmmaker Bill Brand Bill Brand frames the body and its trace, linking painting and cinematic space. SWANS ISLAND explores the act of seeing as inextricable with that of being seen.
SWAN’S ISLAND by Bill Brand and Katy Martin
2005, 16mm film, 5 minutes
Premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival (official selection)
GUILIN ROAD is a meditation on how we identify physically with the people and things we look at, whether traveling far from home or walking down familiar streets. Emphasizing my own physicality, it also takes issue with the notion of the disembodied eye.
GUILIN ROAD combines observations I made in China with footage shot in my studio in New York. What I noticed in Shanghai was how movement (my own and the people's around me) relates to everyday objects in the environment. These inanimate objects reflect and prescribe action, so they choreograph a street dance.
GUILIN ROAD by Katy Martin
2005, video, 5 minutes
Premiered at the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art
A private, interior world takes shape within the coded context of shared urban space, as images from 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.
SKINSIDE OUT by Bill Brand and Katy Martin
2002, 16mm film, 11 minutes
Premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, NEXT Wave
SILKSCREENS by Katy Martin
sound by Richard Teitelbaum
1978, DVD from super 8 mm film, 20 minutes
DAFFODILS by Katy Martin
1981, DVD from super 8mm, 3 minutes, silent
Included in Big as Life: A History of 8mm Film in America
at the Museum of Modern Art (New York)
A poem to my husband in the early days of our romance
SILKSCREENS follows the choreography of printmakers at work, pulling the edition of Johns' print, THE DUTCH WIVES. Johns himself does not appear in this film. I hadn t yet met him, but I was intrigued by the patterns of the printers movements, and I wanted to film them. I got the notion of repetitive labor as a form of dance from the French painter, Edgar Degas. No doubt, I was also influenced by minimalism (for example, the work of Yvonne Rainer, Jackie Winsor, Carl Andre and Vito Acconci) with its impetus to integrate work, and ordinary movements and materials into fine art. For the sound track of Silkscreens, I worked with the musician, Richard Teitelbaum. We used ambient sounds from the print shop and the street outside to reflect the kind of hearing that you experience as you work, when sounds float in and out of consciousness.
DRAWING BREATH by Katy Martin
1979, DVD from super 8mm, 4 minutes, silent
Why has my own image always been so elusive? On a sleepless night, I lit a candle, and began a pixillation in a mirror.
KACHO (FLOWERS AND BIRDS) by Katy Martin
1979-2006, DVD from super 8mm film, 9 minutes, silent
This film is about the pleasure of looking. When I shot it, I was steeped in Japanese aesthetics.
BREATHING TWICE
2009, video, 7 minutes
Developed in association with
The Museum of Chinese in America′s
Chinatown Film Project
Featuring Lu Yu, reading from a text by
Sima Qian, Records of the Historian (ca. 92 BCE)
Calligraphic images of paint on skin, which the filmmaker traces on her own body, are intercut with details of New York′s Chinatown. Meanwhile, a classic Chinese story, about a clever messenger and a treasured piece of jade, emerges in passing from the ambient sounds heard on Chinatowns streets.
BREATHING TWICE is a portrait of a specific place, and also a study of line - line as drawing, painting and writing, and line in relation to language. BREATHING TWICE also looks at less visible lines, especially the elusive, disappearing lines that may, or may not, divide one frame of reference from another.
This piece unfolds in two languages, so that the experience is different depending on whether the viewer speaks English, Chinese, or both.
Selected Work (1978–present)
Included in Big as Life: A History of 8mm Film in America
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York
This film has shown in museums around the world including
The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), The National Gallery (Washington DC), The Isetan Museum (Tokyo) and The Kunstmuseum Basel (Switzerland).
The soundtrack interview has been published by The Walker Art Center, MOMA and others. It has also been translated into French and Dutch.
HANAFUDA/JASPER JOHNS
1981, DVD from super-8mm film, 35 minutes
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 structuring an in-depth apprenticeship with a major artist. 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.
Jasper Johns
Interviewed by Katy Martin
published by The Walker Art Center.
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