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2013 Residency Participants: Sarah Biagini

Sarah:

Sarah’s Work:

Website

Vimeo

About Sarah’s practice:

As a flicker junkie, my films are engineered to call attention to the perceptual mode we’re simultaneously using to perceive them. I try to emphasize film’s multiple personalities not just through frame-by-frame flicker, but also through the construction of intricate layers of composite imagery. By collaging appropriated and original footage, each frame of a composite image becomes a co-existence of the histories, techniques, narrative content, and social/political context of disparate source materials.

The common subjective thread between my projects is often the act of interpreting personal histories. I conduct extensive research into an interesting idea or person and try to represent something of what I imagine that person’s experience to be. I choose subjects that give me an excuse to learn about something new.

In 2012 I completed an MFA at the University of Colorado, where I received a Virgil Grillo Memorial Production Grant, and a Beverly Sears Research Grant and have since been finishing a long-term 16mm film project, As the Squirrel Turns. Prior to beginning grad school I was lucky enough to spend four months as a visiting artist in Paros, Greece, at the Hellenic International Studies in the Arts.

How Sarah might use the residency:

One project idea I might develop concerns counting sheep — the idiom popularly used to describe trying to fall asleep — as a common form of what behavior research calls “imagery distraction.” As a filmmaker highly influenced by formalist aesthetics, I’m interested in the idea of using a structural sequence of images as a light form of mind control, in this case altering one’s own conscious state. It would be an amazing opportunity to explore this specific concept in an environment where “counting sheep” has its own meaning and even its own traditional Scots numbering system.