still life
By Jeremy Newman and Rachel Blythe Udell
Music by Rachel Blythe Udell
This video is a kinetic exploration of an environment populated by soft sculptures and embroidery collages. The central grouping evokes a traditional still life. Sewn sculptures are seated across from one another on flowered chairs. Between them, a third sculpture is plump and sparkling with limbs outstretched, and glass beads woven into its tapestried skin. It rests on a table with teacups on both sides. In this magical realm the teacups brim with rocks from an ancient forest floor that used to be ocean.
The biomorphic forms, made from recycled and repurposed materials, are stitched together pointing to the hand of an artist. Yet, the work has a life of its own. Vibrant colors and varied patterns echo throughout the installation. Light spills in from every direction, flowing through the air in elegant streams. Sweeping camera movements and video effects animate the forms. The floor is ribboned with rocks, their curved formations wrapping around padded embroideries, like amoebas or round cells being pulled into ovals, just before the moment they will split apart.
At the end of the video, the installation remains intact except for the floor where the embroidery collages disappear, leaving only the rocks. In contrast to the handmade elements, these components are sculpted by natural forces. The stirrings and shifting of water, sand, marl, mud, and the decayed accumulations of things once alive have shaped their forms and smoothed their surfaces over the span of millennia. Unlike the flowers or fruit of the traditional still life which only exist for a moment in human time, rocks mark the vastness of geologic time.
cosmic rocks
By Jeremy Newman and Rachel Blythe Udell
2024
This experimental video approaches rocks with a sense of wonder, marveling at their forms sculpted over millennia. Stop-motion sequences and sweeping camera movements create a rhythmic and lyrical journey. Here, these earth-bound subjects are untethered, floating across the screen as if seeking their space cousins. Prehistoric forms, textures, and patterns are transformed by modern video effects, suggesting a timelessness.
flickerings
By Jeremy Newman and Rachel Blythe Udell
Music by Rachel Blythe Udell
Portal
2024
By Rachel Blythe Udell and Jeremy Newman
Music by Rachel Blythe Udell
A video by Jeremy Newman and Rachel Blythe Udell. Art and music by Rachel Blythe Udell. "Portal" is a short experimental film composed of three vignettes. Each part represents a world visited by explorers seeking a new home. Light, color, energy and texture inform these worlds. Fibrous sculptures and natural elements form dense landscapes rich with the promise of life. The visitors, reminiscent of neurons, dance and frolic across the colorful terrain. They are curious and mystical. They revel in delight. But they encounter obstacles and knotty predicaments. The landscapes transform in response to the explorers, with strange and ominous reverberations. There are links between these fantastical worlds and ours: the beauty and wonder of curiosity, the beneficial and portentous prospects of change, the cycles of destruction and rebirth.
We Can Never Go Back
2023
By Rachel Blythe Udell
Music by Rachel Blythe Udell
A woman’s time spent in her garden transports her to a dreamlike state in which the beauty of nature blends with her art, and becomes a place of refuge and solace. The film represents her consciousness, how she thinks and feels about her art, love, a feeling of belonging and connectedness, and how making art helps her to cope with grief and loss. As she tends her garden, time contracts and expands, the past and present collapse. She is suffused in the glow of her beloved pets who have now departed this realm, and in the garden she was forced to leave.
SOLIPSISM
2023
By Rachel Blythe Udell
Music by Rachel Blythe Udell
This film explores a woman’s preoccupation with herself physically, emotionally, and philosophically, and her inability to escape either herself or her image. Filmed in 1998 on Super8 film, then digitized and set to music in 2023.