Flowers for Joyce

This hand-edited Super8 film was made in response to Kriss Boggild’s 2008 curatorial challenge to her women artist friends to address the indictment, “Serious women artists don’t do flowers.” I made it as a tribute to the late filmmaker and artist Joyce Wieland (1931-1998). In the 1960s and 70s, Wieland made films alongside Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton and others of New York’s celebrated and historicized avant-garde filmmakers. In the 1980s, I heard Wieland speak bitterly about being left out in much of the accounting of this history. Wieland’s approach to film making was truly materialist—often situated in domestic and personal experience. In my tribute, I repeat a couple of the structuralist and materialist tricks that she used in her 1986 film, Birds at Sunrise. Like it, Flowers for Joyce was filmed using a crude aperture made from a piece of paper rolled up and attached to the end of the camera. This iris-shrinking device highlights the mediation or restrictions imposed on the viewer by the camera technology and the filmmaker’s choices. Both films were shot and screened with consumer-style cameras and celluloid film. I processed the black and white sections in the bathroom in my home. In Wieland’s practice, some of her film works were produced in her kitchen using experimental methods. For me, these materials and techniques are used to communicate a search for something – ways of living and understanding the everyday in which small, domestic and local scenarios convey profound promise and failure. Flowers for Joyce offers a simple narrative. In the story, the artist is determined to make a field of flowers within the confines of a traffic round-about. Each task towards this goal—planting, weeding and pruning—are recorded. So too is the idyllic picnic-for-two that happens inside of the circle after it fills with flowers. Then, an unexpected tragedy strikes, causing a dramatically changed scene by the end.