Caryn Cline’s Botanicollage Films

For over twenty years, Caryn Cline has handcrafted intimate films that reframe the familiar through experiments in scale and context. Cline coined the term “botanicollage” to describe the technique pioneered by Stan Brakhage (Mothlight, Garden of Earthly Delights) in which flowers, leaves, and other organic matter are fused directly onto celluloid. Once small and overlooked, her weedy subjects demand the full cinematic frame, revealing often astonishingly beautiful qualities. By placing plants in an unfamiliar context, the filmmaker aims to “transform reality utterly”* and, in so doing, invite us to reflect on our own relationships with the botanical world.

All Flesh is Grass

Director: Caryn Cline
USA, 2017, 12', color
no dialogue

All Flesh is Grass experimentally documents a prairie restoration site in rural Missouri.

 

Lost Winds

Director: Caryn Cline 
USA, 2017, 3', color
no dialogue

A site-specific botanicollage film from San Clemente, CA, containing both planned and "chance" animation.

 

Butterfly Disaster

Director: Caryn Cline
USA, 2019, 6', color
no dialogue

Extinction of monarch butterflies in the US became a topic of a film based on manipulation of found footage. The director adjusts archival recordings of butterflies or planes spreading fertilizers through double exposure, scratching, colouring and so don, coming up with a purely visual micro-essay asking who is really the pest and who is the infested in this ecosystem.

Zephyr

Zephyr

Caryn Cline’s Botanicollage Films

Caryn Cline’s Botanicollage Films

Paris Without End (1959-1965)

Paris Without End (1959-1965)

In the 60s, Alberto Giacometti paid homage to Paris, the city where he lived, by drawing its streets, cafés, and more private places like his studio and the apartment of his wife, Annette. These drawings would make up his last book, Paris sans fin (Paris Without End). 

Janine Antoni Look At Me!

Janine Antoni Look At Me!

The exhibition Look at Me! Portraits and Other Fictions from the ”la Caixa” Contemporary Art Collection examines portraiture, one of the oldest artistic genres, through a significant number of works of our times. Through the exhibition we will be sharing about the artists and sections in Look At Me!. This time we are sharing about Janine Antoni , exhibited under the section “The Conventions of Identitiy”!

The First Nudes

The First Nudes

Men were the first nudes in Turkish painting. The majority of these paintings were academic studies executed in oil paint; they were part of the education of artists that had finally attained the opportunity to work from the live model. The gender of the models constituted an obstacle in the way of characterizing these paintings as ‘nudes’.