Rules of the Universe
An animation loop for installation inspired by third century drawings of Roman marionettes. Play turns into violence, magic is performed and layers of graphics inspired by Max Ernst along with an image borrowed from Ernst Haeckel emerge with a piece that gives historical significance to what we laugh at, what we enjoy and how repetition becomes hypnotic. The ritual of violence is embedded in a universal sphere where collateral damage becomes normal.
As You Desire Me
As You Desire Me was designed as an installation where the viewer could move and contemplate the screens separately. Three locations in the city of Rome were filmed as backgrounds for drawn animation. The animation is a kind of graffiti over the city, a form of social protest. The piece becomes an elegy mimicking the feeling when one is part of a religious procession or protest march. Empire Of Dreams by the poet Charles Simic underscores the feeling of alienation and loss.
This film was inspired by the emotional qualities of the city of Rome when the Iraq War was declared. The city responded to this in powerful ways. Surrealistic characters in real settings navigate the city where trains and cars bound but it is on foot where travel is realiable. One of the components is based on a poem “Empire of Dreams” Charles Simic which inspires the lost person becoming a mask of the self . The three screen structure demonstrates the complexity of the city as a web of passing through and those living there.
A text about the piece by Steve Anker:
Maureen Selwood weaves three internal images to portray historic streets and the countryside outside of Rome as locations visited by spectral figures that move with trance-like repetition and reappear unpredictably between the different frames. The artist’s responses to her environment while living in this ancient city were influenced by tragic events, most immediately the Iraq war, and landscapes echo with the presence of refugees and a fear of disaster and sense of lamentation. A ragged dog wanders through desolate streets, a stream of black-cloaked women stream through the hillside, faces cluster together and are superimposed over the different settings. There is a dream-like quality to these moving figures that is inevitable and filled with mortality and loss. Yet, as with all of the films on this program, it is also a world in which the ominous merges unexpectedly with that of fragile beauty and wonder.
Direction: Maureen Selwood
Animation: Maureen Selwood and Maria Vasilkovsky
Composer: Anna Oxygen
As You Desire Me
Duration: 9:45
As You Desire Me is a meditation on the city of Rome when the Iraq War was declared. Three city landscapes represent time in the haunting gap between the cold and barren landscape, and the people who traverse it. The three-channel film event uses surrealistic characters in real settings as a way to address sorrow and catastrophe. One of the components of the film is the poem, Empire of Dreams by Charles Simic.
Empire of Dreams
By Charles Simic
On the first page of my dreambook
It’s always evening
In an occupied country.
Hour before the curfew.
A small provincial city.
The houses all dark.
The storefronts gutted.
I am on a street corner
Where I shouldn’t be.
Alone and coatless
I have gone out to look
For a black dog who answers to my whistle.
I have a kind of Halloween mask
Which I am afraid to put on.
Directed By
Maureen Selwood
Animation by
Maureen Selwood and Maria Vasilkovksy
Composer
Anna Oxygen