Molly Davies doesn’t mind that the era of YouTube and Instagram has turned video production–a medium in which she has made her life’s work–into a mundane practice. Instead she embraces modern technology and appreciates that social media has heightened people’s attentiveness and interest in the act of viewing. “I really like the accessibility of the visual medium to almost everybody,” she says.

The difference, though, between what Davies does as a video artist and the endless Internet uploads of the masses is her devotion to detail and focus. When she walks her dog, she notices—really notices—a bird singing or the leaves in the trees. It’s the view through the videographer’s lens that fascinates, she says.

Otherwise, someone just hits the record button until the battery runs out. “One of the great problems with ubiquitous video-making is it is exactly that, and it is deeply boring,” she laughs.

Davies will lead a video workshop, “Capturing Motion,” from 2 to 5 p.m. July 23 at Cold Hollow Sculpture Park, just outside Enosburg Falls, Vermont. In it, she will invite participants to use their cellphone cameras to shoot video around the park.

Of course, it’s a challenge to make stationary sculpture stimulating. Workshop participants will have to consider framing in a way that intrigues the eye and watch for interruptions in that frame and changes over time, perhaps the movement of clouds overhead, Davies says. “Time is the element of video.” The creativity lies in each person’s interpretation—the set-up and organization of the images. Davies and her video editor, Philip Roy, will examine participants’ work and possibly combine the images into a collaboration.“I’m interested in what people are thinking and feeling and seeing,” she says.

Davies’ work is akin to choreography. She arranges her images like a dance, allowing their interaction with one another to evoke mood and story. A series of videos with two performers weaving through, climbing, pushing against, and moving around ladders becomes riveting to watch. For “Sea Tails,” a multichannel video of underwater kites, she structured the piece in a grid, taking three different elements of video and moving them around.

Molly Davies still of Sea Tails

Davies has collaborated with musicians and artists including composer John Cage, dancer Suzushi Hanayagi and poet Anne Carson. Her work has appeared in art galleries, museums, and festivals around the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Venice Film Festival; Musée de l’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; and Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival.

Now 73 and living in Stowe, Vermont, Davies had an interest in photography and gravitated toward filmmaking after her first child was born and her father bought her a Super 8 camera to document her daughter’s life. Super 8 involved a finite amount of film and required linear composition of images, forcing Davies to make careful choices in shooting. She still prefers that kind of deliberation and selectivity, even with the more flexible format of digital.
“You choose your frame and the perspective with which you’re going to look at this object or this event,” she says. “You just don’t keep rolling until something happens.”

Molly Davies still from In No Time

She worked her way through 16 millimeter, Regular 8 and Beta technology. Davies now carries a decent but not fancy camera. She has no “technical elitism” or interest in bells and whistles. Art has nothing to do with the tools used, but the “act of seeing,” she says. “In a way, that’s great, because there are not technical barriers to making video, and I think that’s kind of cool, because anybody can do it.”

Molly Davies–video artist
Stowe, Vermont
Vimeo

Top image: Still from Molly Davies’ video,Tubes. Photo courtesy of Molly Davies.

The post Take a Look appeared first on Take Magazine.

I was moving like a monsoon through a forest. I was thinking about where I saw myself in two thousand years . . . And where I saw myself was a tiny subspace ripple sliding through the corridors with a plastic horse in my hand. – Bianca Stone, Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours

Bianca Stone was born and raised in Vermont. She is the granddaughter of American poet, Ruth Stone; the daughter of fiction writer, Abigail Stone; and she herself is a poet, visual artist, and Chair of the Ruth Stone Foundation.

A proud descendent of a strong line of women, it makes sense that Stone would want to work hard to preserve the history and creative vigor of her family. “I moved to New York City for graduate school, and lived there for almost 10 years. I’ve just moved back so that I can work full time on the Ruth Stone Foundation,” said Stone. “My husband and I loved Brooklyn so much, but we knew if we were really going to make our dream happen with the foundation, we would have to be here putting everything into it.”

Being raised by a single mother, Stone spent a lot of time with her grandmother growing up.

“She encouraged me to constantly write, as did my mother,” said Stone.

After her grandmother’s death in 2011, Stone was appointed trustee of her estate along with Poet Laureate of Vermont, Chard deNiord, and Nora Swan. Together they have founded The Ruth Stone Foundation at the site of her home in Goshen, VT.

Page from I am Full of Mythos by Bianca Stone

“We’ve just started a new project called The Ruth Stone House Reader, which features chapbook-length collections of poetry from Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Jennifer Tamayo, Cathy Linh Che, and Carolina Ebeid,” Stone says.

Established in 2013, The Foundation serves to fulfill Ruth Stone’s wish that her physical and literary estate would be used for the furthering of poetry and the creative arts. It was created not only to nurture contemporary poetry and art in its many forms, but also to cultivate and celebrate the works and legacy of the poet herself.

Stone says, “as a yearly anthology, the Reader looks to Ruth Stone’s legacy of supporting her community and offers each author a residency in Vermont. Taking on a range of voices, styles, and subjects, the collection highlights the boldness and complexity of poetry in the early 21st century. This is writing that embraces those who offer care and confronts those who don’t. This is writing that spans narrative meditation, intertextual performance, and lyrical bravado. This is poetry that will challenge and engross you.”

When she’s not working with the Ruth Stone Foundation, Stone is publishing books of poetry and poetry comics on her own. She is the author of the poetry collections Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Tin House/Octopus Books, 2014), Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours (Pleiades Books, 2016), and multiple chapbooks.

“I’ve always been a visual artist as well as a writer, but it wasn’t until graduate school at NYU that I had to opportunity to work with Anne Carson and Matthew Rohrer that I heard the term ‘poetry comics’ and I leapt on the chance to start experimenting on deliberately combining text and image in the form of poetry,” said Stone.

She is also a contributing artist for a special edition of Anne Carson‘s Antigonick, and along with her husband, the poet Ben Pease, Stone co-edits the small poetry press Monk Books.

“Currently I’m working on my new book of poetry,” shares Stone. “I’m about the have a baby so I’m trying to get the first draft done before she comes!”

With the newest Stone daughter on her way, we can’t help but wonder…will she be a writer too?

For more information on Bianca Stone please visit her Website for a deeper exploration of her work. 

All images courtesy Bianca Stone

The post The Daughters Stone appeared first on Take Magazine.