Living with Rivers
This event is free and open to the public in The Mast General Community Room at the Appalachian Theater of the High Country.
A program of experimental shorts by area filmmakers that focuses on rivers in Western North Carolina and the impact of Hurricane Helene
Friday, October 2 at 7pm, Mast Community Room at the Appalachian Theatre
Co-presented by the Blowing Rock Art and History Museum and Toy Sheep Microcinema
Exploring the ecological devastation and community resilience along three rivers in Western North Carolina following Hurricane Helene, the short films presented in this program offer a meditation on the beguiling, nurturing and fearsome powers of water, and what it means to live with rivers. Taken together, these films offer us an opportunity to think about the relationship between humans and rivers in Southern Appalachia and the way that film can expand our capacity to appreciate the sublime beauty of water.
The program includes three films:
Swannanoan Siltby Issac King and Tristan Turner, a two-channel experimental 16mm film performance with live music accompaniment by Agis Shaw. The performance relies on film footage that not only shows life along the Swannanoa River in the days following the hurricane, but was also developed using actual floodwaters.
Inundation, by Tom Hansell, a short moving image poem that captures the filmmaker’s personal experience living on the banks of the New River and making sense of the sudden ecological shifts and the overwhelming flooding brought to the region by the storm.
Broad Riverby Drew Erin Adams is a part of an on-going cycle of films tracing rivers across the world. Shot on a spring-wound Bolex on Ektachrome, the work stays close to surface conditions in and around the water, and is non-didactic, without illustrated metaphor. Adams lives at the river’s headwaters, just past the continental divide in Black Mountain, NC, and has been shooting this film slowly over time. What emerges are glimpses of a life alongside the river in the aftermath of Helene. The film is hand-spliced and edited by hand on a workbench rather than a screen.
The screening will be followed by a conversation with the filmmakers moderated by Jennie Carlisle, Director of the Gallery Program for the Art Department at Appalachian State University. It is part of the exhibition Field Studies: Ways of Knowing Place, currently on view at BRAHM. Funding for this event has been provided by the Humanities Council of the High Country, Toy Sheep Microcinema, and the Blowing Rock Art and History Museum.
About the artists
Drew Erin Adams is a multidisciplinary artist working across film and music, based in Black Mountain, NC. He shoots on a spring-wound Bolex 16mm camera and works primarily with analog film, from capture through final cut. He is currently at work on The River Cycle, a series of films tracing rivers across four continents.
Tom Hansell is a Boone, NC-based filmmaker, author, and educator whose work focuses on rural communities in southern Appalachia. His documentary work has screened at the Museum of Modern Art and has been included in the Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers. He began his career at the Appalshop media arts center, and currently teaches at Appalachian State University.
Isaac King, a native South Carolinian, centers his film practice around handmade and recycled cinema, while embracing the artistry of amateur filmmaking. He often uses celluloid film, manipulating its flexible materiality. His work and research focus on matters of representation and socio-ecological metamorphosis, particularly in the South.
Agis Shaw is an independent musician and record producer based in Greensboro, NC. His craft unifies interest in 20th-century Western popular music, avant-garde experimentalism, classical and folk traditions worldwide, jazz philosophy, and universal law. Utilizing the merits of both tape and digital technology, Agis strives to find the deeper ties between music and life by accentuating the acoustic and physical nature of sound in his recordings, closer resembling dreams and emotions, and bringing practices of the past into a modern context.
Tristan Turner is an experimental filmmaker and mixed media artist from Asheville, NC. His work aims to combine the aesthetics of the past and present to interrogate medium specificity, new limits, and personal expression. Tristan is fond of both digital and analog imagery. Often in his work, he blends the two until they merge into something both familiar and alien. Community, nature, poetry, collaboration, diaristic narratives, mixed media, ecology, abstraction, and visual experimentation are core values in his work. Philosophically, Tristan believes that cinema is the most boundless platform of human expression. Everything is cinema.