“I Covered My Eyes” a film by Emerson’s Artist in Residence – Paul W. Turano | grooveTEK.net
by BuddhaBoy on 17/09/09 at 1:25 pm
From I Covered My Eyes (2008)
a film by
Paul Turano
My work from over 15 years as a practicing image maker has developed through autobiographical and essayistic experimental strategies, from small meditations to expansive explorations. I examine the process of image making as a way of communicating personal, social and political ideas or interpretations of history, from both the domestic and the public spheres. The images and sounds I present refer to subjects as far away as Mars and as close as my own back porch.
I work with film and video, often integrating these formats in the same piece. My current work investigates the effect of mediated experience on the construction of personal identity and memory. I Covered My Eyes juxtaposes television news broadcasts I witnessed as a child with my family’s own contemporaneous home movie footage, and examines how those images helped shape my sense of the human capacity for wrongdoing. In 2007, I received a grant from the LEF Foundation Moving Image Fund that has enabled me to complete this work and develop my digital video essay We the Ecotopia, a meditation on environmental sustainability exemplified by the small island of Tikopia in the Solomon Islands. When faced with a microcosmic equivalent of the resource depletion, monocultural food dependency and over-population issues we currently face on a global level, the Tikopians re-envisioned their relationship to these practices to save their island from destruction. Currently I am in the pre-production phases of this project and have begun shooting in 16:9 digital video and HD formats.
My ongoing work in 16mm has focused on the transformation of domestic space into a metaphor for autobiographical experiences. Two recent works, Porch Film: 76 Day St. Apt. #2, from 2004, and Windows onto Montebello Rd., currently in the editing phase, utilize similar observational strategies for depicting personal space as a vehicle for social and psychological transformation. The personal poetic approaches to the image in these films is driven by the more prosaic use of sound that provides both a supplementary emotional register as well as a contextual grounding in a larger social or political moment. As in all my work, the strategy of autobiography functions as a construction through which I may examine the larger issues that both intrigue and challenge me.
