Festival Installations
Art available for your viewing pleasure all festival long

Key-p It Reel
Esther Kirschenbaum Grand Foyer

The largest installation of the festival, it takes over the majority of the grand foyer and stairway. Click here to view her previous installations.

Body of Evidence
Rich Pell Mezzanine and Screening Room Lobby

Body of Evidence examines the physical artifacts of the FBI investigation of artist Steven Kurtz. The items the FBI seized from his home are represented here in photographs of the negative spaces they left behind: missing computers, books, notes, props from performances, lab equipment and an unfinished manuscript. Curiously, the items that were ignored are as telling as the ones that were taken. The confiscated library books relating to the history of biowarfare might have been further illuminated by the adjacent box of slides documenting twenty years of art projects devoted to examining abuses of power.

Balancing these empty spaces is the voluminous pile of garbage the FBI left behind at the Kurtz residence. Here we have a rare window into the anatomy of a "bioterror" investigation. Hand drawn maps, "to do" lists, and countless articles of protective clothing are set against a backdrop of several hundred energy drinks and over thirty pizza boxes. To date, none of the seized items have ever been returned.

Beyond Ken Burns
Mike Mosher Men's Bathroom

Ann Arbor-raised artist Mike Mosher will install "Beyond Ken Burns"at the 46th Annual Ann Arbor Film Festival, March 25 thru 30 at the Michigan Theater. The installation will be located in the Men's washroom, as Mosher remembers witty washroom installations during Ann Arbor Film Festivals he attended when he was in high school and college.

The imagery in "Beyond Ken Burns" is based on photos of the Pioneer High School Film Society in school yearbooks--The Omega--from 1971 and 1972. These were the years, respectively, that Ken and his brother Ric graduated. Neither of the two noted documentarians appeared among the creative, young men and women (for the club was apparently not a sexist "boys' room") in the club photos.

In this environmental artwork, Mosher returns to the yearbook-based imagery that began his artistic career three decades ago. Unlike his earlier cubistic pastels, watercolors and computer graphics on the subject, here he creates monumental figures and portrait busts that give the hip university-town teenagers the gravity of classical frescoes and statues. All are painted in acrylics on Rufco-Wrap, a homebuilder's plastic, cut out and affixed to the restroom walls.

100 Eyes
Mike Mosher Ladies Bathroom

A second installation, "100 Eyes", appears in the Women's washroom. Staring, unblinking paper eyes manifest the male and female gazes at the site. Female eyes suggest women checking each other out, as sisters, rivals or objects of desire. Male eyes may evoke there a creepy aura of voyeurs, or intrusive surveillance. Or do the eyes summon the memorable glances of film actors of either sex, or of the cinema camera itself? Before this installation, the last time the artist had been in a Women's washroom was as a four-year-old, with his mother at Goodyear's Department Store, Main Street, Ann Arbor.

Tooth and Nail
Dolores Wilbur 8min

Tooth and Nail (2007) is a multi-celled video comprised of grinning mouth of silvered teeth, red and black hand grenades fondled in a kind of shell game, a close-up of charred ash, nails, and metal debris, and a safety pin spinning on a piece of filament. The work contains no spoken text. Images appear simultaneously in a moving video grid of grenades, metal teeth, detritus of a fragmented bomb and single safety pins, with an abstract sound track. This version bleeds to red on an 8-minute cycle.

wellen
Marco Antoniazzi 13min

Where the film wellen starts and where it again and again returns to is a white screen and absolute silence. Out of this "pre-cinematic" condition a simple tone emerges and oscillates in different variants of frequency and amplitude above and below the threshold hearing, as if the white screen itself were undulated into complex oscillations like an analogous oscillograph.

passage
Peter Byrne/Carol Woodlock/Allan Schindler

“passage” reflects on the peripheral. An inquiry into memory, landscape, and departure, this work visually catches sight of experience, as it moves past. In this work, the artists create a layered encounter with streams of imagery and sound. The imagery was created through the use of multiple sources: live action sequences, ink drawings on paper, and digital imagery. The imagery and animation evolved through editing and compositing in digital post-production.