WORLD PREMIERE!
PETRICHOR
(2017)
16mm, color, silent, 15 min
(MFA Thesis Film / University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee)
Screening this Sunday, May 21, 2017, 7:00pm
KENILWORTH SQUARE EAST GALLERY
(1925 E. Kenilworth Place, Milwaukee WI 53202)
Free admission...Refreshments to follow
Shot on Kodak Vision 3 7203, 7207, 7219; Fuji F-64D; Eterna Vivid 160; Eastman EXR 7248 and EXR 7293 (quite expired).
Print by Fotokem.
I had been dreaming of becoming a storm chaser for the past several summers. Since I was a child thunderstorms have always inspired a most delicious combination of revelry and terror within me.
In the summers of 2015/16 I set out on a few of my own (timid) forays into storm chasing…hoping not so much to capture ‘the deadliest tornado’, but instead, portray, on film, some of the ethereal colors and impossibly dark atmospheres that are at the core of my fascination with this weather phenomenon.
On one level, the film is the narrative of a mid-western thunderstorm…with images of gathering cumulonimbus clouds, downpours, windswept landscapes…and a sense of progression. But there is also a willful subversion of this order, with a play of color fields, film grain, and flashes from a wandering mind’s eye. Finally, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, we arrive at a locale that might exist only in dreams.
My personal journey in making this film brought me to an unexpected feeling of childhood nostalgia…and a sense of mourning for a lost American landscape (a feeling not unrelated to the current horrors of the American political scene.)
