2022 MDFF Installations on view at the Parkway
Moving image installations from some of the most imaginative minds in the Mid-Atlantic region. These works celebrate the power of partnership and take the viewer on a journey around a microcosm of nature and deeper into the Black experience.
Both installations are free and open for the public to view in the SNF Parkway Theatre during festival hours of operation. All attendees must follow the festival’s COVID-19 policies.
2nd floor lobby:
Field Companion (Nadia Hironaka & Matthew Suib, 2021, Maryland, 20 min., looped)
Set in a microcosmic forest, Field Companion is based loosely on the pine barrens that dot Southern New Jersey near the home of Hironaka & Suib. Like many, the duo found refuge and solace throughout the COVID-19 pandemic hiking and foraging in these remote, natural landscapes. As America’s social fabric frayed deeply over recent years, they considered forest ecosystems in terms of symbiotic and collaborative relationships that sustain coexistence and community.
In Field Companion, the forest has been condensed and transplanted to a terrarium in the artists’ studio. Twelve cubic feet of pines, shrubs, ferns, moss, fungus and carnivorous plants are reflected infinitely in the terrarium’s mirrored walls and captured with a motion-controlled camera and specialized macro lens that dramatically shift the scale and perspective of this miniature landscape.
Living dwellers—snails, slugs, and insects inhabit the miniature ecosystem, accompanied by digitally rendered part-animal, part-human creatures. Through their conversations and interactions, they look forward, investigating progressive methods of sustainability. The film also touches upon the notion of forest-bathing, the Japanese practice of exploring the natural environment through our senses.
3rd floor lobby:
Amethyst Love Godz: Wedding of the Afro-Future (dir. Evie Miller, 2019, Maryland, 26 min., looped)
Where continuous time, love and conflict exist in a story of romance and resilience, there’s bound to be triumph and cliff-hanging short moments of release. Husband and wife duo Kariz Marcel and B.FLY symbolize the strength of a Black Family bonded by thoughts of the past and visions of the future. This once abducted and murdered couple travels hundreds of years only to be confronted in several lifetimes with the same colonizing evils that caused their demise. Guided separately by ancestral forces, they journey through a foreign land, blind to the vision, but strong in cellular memory. Will the village succeed in leading this majestic couple to holy matrimony? Or do time and the powers of oppression get the best of them?