hand-crafted cinema by Dinorah de Jesús Rodriguez

http://www.solislandmediaworks.com

about my art work...



I create time-based art made of hand-crafted film, video, text, performance, installation and/or sound. My passion is subliminal manipulation via the power of embedded single frames and the classic use of cinematic cues to manipulate programmed reactions. My pieces often include snippets of vintage commercials, cartoons, pornography and movie trailers to initiate subconscious dialogues that deconstruct and recycle programmed emotional and moral responses to mass media.

My awakening as an artist came when I saw for the first time the films of Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Norman McLaren, and Len Lye while studying Film Production at Boston University sometime around 1977. Since then, I have been working as an experimental filmmaker (and more recently, as a video and installation artist) with an emphasis on vintage 16mm footage and alternative frame-by-frame animation techniques such as drawing and scratching directly on celluloid. I received most of my training and education independently by studying with contemporary artists of the late 70s in the San Francisco Bay Area, inspired by their theories and techniques, their concentrations, preoccupations, processes and solutions. Among my earliest artist mentors were culture and gender theorists such as Barbara Hammer, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and the late Warren Sonbert, Marlon Riggs, Christine Saxton and many others. I will be eternally grateful to every one of them for the influence and vision that each has brought to my life and creative work.

Upon my arrival in Miami in the ealry 90s, I was fortunate enough to meet the elusive and notorious Doris Wishman, who was using the (now defunct) Alliance for Media Arts Co-Op here in Miami Beach to edit her sexploitation films (yes, she was still working on these at that time, well into her 80s i think) with then-local filmmaker Abel Klainbaum as her editor. It was probably at that point that my commitment to working with pornography and to the deconstruction of pop culture, and especially erotic imagery, was clenched. It was also probably around that time that I began working in found 16mm footage in lieu of and alongside footage that I shot myself. Eventually, I added digital video footage to the mix as well.

My filmmaking process is a combination of primitive craft, graffiti, zen meditation, and slick digital technology. I mark on images that have been pre-recorded as part of our cultural legacy and change their meaning by embedding subliminal messages into individual frames. I invest hundreds of hours of real-time to color and scratch frame by frame on the celluloid using processes that date back to the 19th Century, then convert it via digital wizardry into 3 minutes of screen-time. I sometimes tear apart one work to create another from the same original footage, recycling images from an intangible past and projecting them into an intangible memory. In the end, the work is always a hybrid born of cinema and visual art.

I love installation and media design for stage, as these disciplines directly address the “present” much like early cinema did: holding the audience captive in a darkened space while a series of fleeting images flickers before their eyes - images that they will not be able to take home with them. I love it when art is more experience than object. I love the question of time and the notion that many realities may be happening simultaneously in parallel worlds. For this reason, I am profoundly in awe of the mechanisms by which a transparent image, filtering light, can alter the energy of that light into infinity and perhaps into dimensions that we are not yet fully conscious of...