More than 50 people attended the opening reception of “Off the Screen!,” an Ann Arbor Film Festival exhibition, at the Ann Arbor Art Center on Friday. The “Moving Image: Performance” exhibition featured installations by Detroit-based artists Yazmin Dababneh, Paul Echeverria and Maddie Shubeck and showcased a variety of multimedia pieces, including sculptures and projections.
The event was a chance for visitors to freely walk through the exhibition and talk to the artists. It was presented in a dark room, which allowed the audience to clearly see the sculptures and art that was being projected on screens throughout the exhibit.
In an email to The Michigan Daily, Mark Tucker, Lloyd Scholars for Writing and the Arts program art director, wrote about how film and the other types of art such as the sculptures and projections displayed at the exhibit complemented each other.
“One of the early pioneers of film, Georges Méliès, was essentially creating a sophisticated magic show made of projected light and shadow,” Tucker wrote. “Since these earliest films projections have been cast on every surface imaginable. Fast forward and witness the interplay between film and every other art form that continues to be the basis for contemporaneous experimentation in galleries, theaters, and virtual digital spaces while hand-made animations and simple stop-action still amaze and amuse.”
In an interview with The Daily, Art & Design freshman Yeonwoo Shim said as a result of exhibitions like “Off the Screen!,” she is interested in experimenting with moving images herself.
“It blurs the boundaries between traditional and digital media,” Shim said, “I find it fascinating how film can be integrated into physical spaces, transforming the way audiences engage with moving images.”
The AAFF has been an important part of the Ann Arbor community for more than 60 years. Tucker wrote about the deep ways art and film are embedded into Ann Arbor’s culture and community and how it provided a space for independent filmmakers and artists to present their work.
“This festival is crucial to supporting the development of established and future experimental artists, for all the obvious reasons (recognition, financial support), but also important reasons not so easily described or understood, and that’s the cultivation of a community and a culture where experimental art is embraced, shown, championed, and celebrated,” Tucker wrote. “This kind of embrace is what sets Ann Arbor apart from other well-meaning towns of similar size.”
The partnership between the visual arts and filmmaking communities at the AAFF fosters conversations about how artists can further collaborate across mediums. AAFF Executive Director Leslie Raymond reflected on how the Ann Arbor community brings these fields together.
“In a way, it’s not just ‘Oh, we’re showing films.’ It’s a whole kind of philosophy around it, a whole kind of way of viewing art communally. And it’s not just ‘Oh, I’m making art,’ and it’s not even like, ‘We’re gonna watch a film.’ It’s the way that everybody is doing that together and then has the space to have conversations about it,” Raymond said.
Daily Staff Reporter Alaine Hanson can be reached at alaineh@umich.edu.
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