My new film, Sangre de Cristo, will be shown on a loop in the CU Art Museum video gallery as part of CU Boulder’s Spring 2011 MFA show, Beyond, which opens Friday, April 1 from 5-7 pm and continues through April 14.
The work in the show from my super amazing MFA brothers and sisters Amber Dawn Cobb, Jesse Ryan Kuroiwa, Shannon Lowry, Adrianna Marie Santiago, Thomas Spradling, Kari Treadwell, Lydia Young and Xi Zhang ranges from photography and digital art to installation, community-based practice, sculpture and painting.
still from Sangre de Cristo
About Sangre de Cristo:
In this short film, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of Southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico are examined as a site where embedded layers of oppositional history converge and are revealed through traces of the past in the present landscape.
Multiple strategies of representation, including re-creation of historical events, narration, meditative observations of landscape and fictional text, are used to present historical vignettes rooted in a sense of place. These include the 18th century conflict between the Comanche chief Cuerno Verde and Spanish colonialists, seen through interpretive markers and place names as well as a play on horseback; the Espinosa brothers, who claimed that the Virgin Mary inspired them to murder Anglo settlers in the wake of the Mexican-American war; an interview with an anarchist activist who moved with his wife to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to live a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle on horseback in the 1970s; and documentation of counterculture architecture in the contemporary landscape that serves as material evidence of the new ways of life envisioned by people drawn to the region. Throughout, words drawn from Rudolph Wurlitzer’s novel, The Drop Edge of Yonder, form a parallel narrative of life in the Sangres.
Marcy Saude 