Passing Fog 2006 - Click on image to view clip
Tomonari Nishikawa
Tomonari Nishikawa received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2006. His works have been shown internationally, including New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Edinburgh International Film Festival, and the 2008 Berlinale. He currently lives in Tokyo, Japan.
Description of Passing Fog (2006, mixed media, USA)
Taking a picture is a process of taking a still from reality. A movie camera
takes series of stills, and a projector shows them in duration.
I carefully placed 16mm filmstrips in a 3-foot tall pinhole camera
in a darkroom, and I exposed them for 18 minutes from the window
of my studio
at the Headlands
Center for the Arts. It was windy, and the fog was hovering over
the hills. After processing the filmstrips, I spliced and contact-printed
them to
make a screening print. Then, I unspliced the original filmstrips
and displayed them as a single 33” x 40” picture on the
Plexiglas.
Scratches and stains on the filmstrips echo well to the exterior of the old
building in where the studio is located, and the moving image shows the visual
of something passing, suggesting the movement of the fog on the hill, or
the wind through the nature because of the sound produced by the visual information
on the optical soundtrack of the film.
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