Stomping Grounds: Senior Seminar Highlights Show
Dylan Wright
My artistic work uses the mediums of film and video. I use my preferred material, 16mm film and clear leader of the same gauge, to create works frame by frame. I prefer film because when shooting or drawing on film, you are never sure of what the final project will look like while working on it. This injects a level of uncertainty within the process as I am never sure what I will end up with, and often have to improvise and adapt, leading to a final product that is unexpected.
This idea of surprise is key to my work. I mirror this surprise I find when reaching the end of my process within the viewer of my work, as well as in the hope that they shouldn’t be able to predict what comes next, whether the work operates within a narrative context or not.
Much of my inspiration comes from observing the ordinary and reframing it in a way that is uncanny and unexpected. I often utilize intensely boring objects or situations and combine them with the strange or extraordinary to create unsettling alternate realities or worlds. I’m interested in the idea of objective and subjective realities, and what happens to supposedly objective scenes when you point a camera at them. By combining scenes of Central Park with a purely constructed animation, I aim to challenge the relationship between what we see and the ideas we form about our surroundings.