As part of a new initiative that coincides with the 2015 Columbus Arts Festival, local street artists Stephanie Rond is working with several artists in Columbus to create outdoor sings that embody each artist’s work.
As part of this project each artist is given a 6″x8″ board which they can do what ever they want with as long as it stays within the confines of the board and it is weather proofed to stand up to being displayed outdoors.
I was lucky enough to be chosen to participate in this project. Primarily as a film and video artist I wanted to find a way to use my training in mixed media, drawing and painting to represent myself as a moving image artist but in a non moving format. A small section of my moving image work is projection performance. My pieces usually involve digital and analog film with live timed cues for manipulating the projection and sometimes live audio. The analog film component usually consist of painted film run through a 16mm projector. For this project I thought it would be great to use 16mm clear film to create a self portrait. “Narrative of an Artist : Life and Love” by Matt Swift is a hand drawn animated film that uses an alphanumeric schema to represent both myself and important dates of my life through various colors in single 16mm frames. When the work is finished the piece will have 192 individual hand-drawn frames that represent a different numbered and lettered sequence.
Here is a sample pic of the work in progress.