1997
2:30 minutes
color
super 8 film
silent
“artificial colors was a simple film, that followed a similar procedure of an earlier film, “book of seconds”, in that both were directed by a series simple actions. while “book of seconds” took a year to complete, and was produced by shooting 10 seconds of sunlight and shadow, artificial colors took maybe an hour to shoot, and the action was simply to find as many artificial colors on the beach until i finished shooting one reel of super 8 film. i can’t remember what my interest was in seeking out artificial colors in the sand of the santa monica beach, but the process was simply spending an hour wandering the beach, documenting every color i could find that was not natural to the location.
while i was interested in capturing these fragments of neglected color, i was also hoping that the resulting film might also be able to function as a score (where each color might determine certain actions or notes). the experience of aimlessly walking along the beach and “picking up” colors instead of seashells, felt like building a rainbow of stepping stones.
the film embraces a slightly out of focus aesthetic, expressing a level of ambivalence or reluctance for an abstract painter to embrace visible objects… and i was definitely uncertain about allowing things to be pictured as they are.
i love this film, specifically as a document of my not yet understanding that the kind of abstraction i was seeking had less to do with what a thing looks like, and more towards its feel – an abstraction intuited through responses to mood, fragmentation, emotion, etc.”