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Margaret Rorison

Margaret Rorison

Birth : , Baltimore, Maryland, USA

History

Margaret Rorison is filmmaker and curator from Baltimore, MD. Her current work focuses on alternative photographic processes, experimentation, and DIY methods of analog filmmaking. Her moving image work has been exhibited at Anthology Film Archives, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Images Festival, Miami PULSE Art Fair, Mono No Aware VI & VII, Microscope Gallery, The Moscow Museum of Modern Art, The National Gallery of Art, and The Walker Art Center. Rorison won The 2018 Baker Artist Award for Film, she is a recipient of a 2016 Rubys Artist Project Grants, a recipient of The 2019 and 2016 Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Awards and a 2015 Sondheim Semi-finalist. She is the co-founder and curator of the film series Sight Unseen which focuses on bringing contemporary image-based work to Baltimore. The series started as a roaming entity in 2012 and now has a permanent home at The SNF Parkway Theatre in Baltimore City. She works as an audiovisual specialist at The National Gallery of Art and teaches filmmaking and photography at The Baltimore School for the Arts, The Maryland Institute College of Art and Anne Arundel Community College.

Profile

Margaret Rorison

Movies

Director

A montage of the underpopulated streets, shuddered storefronts, and crumbling cornices of Baltimore City suggests a disturbed, mind’s eye recollection of social neglect and physical decay.

Director

This film is an ode to navigation, an adaptation to silences, deafening cries. A personal navigation through four seasons of loss. A series of memory frames shot on expired and donated 16mm film. Shot during the years of 2012-2016 in Los Angeles, Gettysburg, and Baltimore.

Sympathetic Bodies

Sympathetic Bodies

Director

"Sympathetic Bodies" (Official Video) by Byron Westbrook from Body Consonance LP (2017) on Hands in the Dark Records Hand-processed and shot on BW Reversal film Made with the support from Crater Lab in Barcelona. Scanned by Colorlab in Rockville, MD

Gedanken aus der Luft

Gedanken aus der Luft

Director

Polluted clouds of burning coal dominate the skies. Meditations on a shifting landscape of what once was former East Berlin.

Memory of August

Memory of August

Director

A series of moments captured in room 139. Intimate spaces of time spent with my grandmother, Margaret during a month long recovery in a rehabilitation center in Baltimore, Maryland.

One Document for Hope

One Document for Hope

Director

The sterile and procedural narrative of the Baltimore City Police Scanner recorded on Monday April 27 against precious moments of gathering, celebration and protest in Baltimore from April 28 – May 3, 2015.

Director

An ode to the restricted space and surveillance in the skies.

The Road to Kalmar

The Road to Kalmar

Director

She moved to Vårdinge, then to Kalmar in 1908. She left on May 8, 1909 for North America to meet a man who never showed up to greet her. She came from a family of poor farmers and made a new life when she settled in Connecticut. Her house always smelled of clean, fresh laundry. She baked sweet goods for her relatives, donuts, cakes and Swedish tortes.

Director

A study of the monolithic wind turbines along the shores of Amager, Copenhagen, Denmark. Triple exposed on one roll of color film, then finding four generations of grain. The soundtrack is a recorded live-improvisation by artist Mario de Vega using unstable media and acoustic resonators.

Funes el memorioso

Funes el memorioso

Director

534 frames of Regular 8mm blown up to 16mm using the JK Optical Printer.

DER SPAZIERGANG

DER SPAZIERGANG

Director

This film documents long walks throughout Berlin, Germany during the cold days of April, 2013. The film is edited in camera and composed of single frame snapshots along with longer moments of glance, captured on one 100’ roll of film. The title comes from a story by Robert Walser.

The Waiting Sands

The Waiting Sands

Director

My grandfather, Harry Bennett was a huge influence on me as a young artist and thinker. He was a painter and had made a living as an illustrator for gothic and romance novels in the 1960s. In the last month of his life, he was omitted to the hospital with terminal conditions. Unable to film him, I began to capture the harvest moon outside his bedroom window as a way to cope with the emotions I was experiencing. A few hours after the footage had been shot, my grandfather passed away. This footage serves as a document of his last breaths.

Director

This film documents a unique choreographed performance that took place one late summer afternoon in Patapsco State Park in Baltimore, Maryland. Choreographed by Clarissa Stowell Gregory and performed by The Effervescent Collective. Soundtrack composed by Josh Millrod.

Director

SCANSION is a short 16mm film composed of extensive walks through various Baltimore landscapes. The film has been hand edited like a poem, where cuts function like line breaks, working to establish inherent rhythm and meter.

THE BIRDS OF CHERNOBYL

THE BIRDS OF CHERNOBYL

Director

An ode to Rorison's grandfather Harry Bennett who made a living as a painter for Gothic and Romance novels in the 60s and 70s. He spent much of his life as a solitary man, committing himself to walking, philosophizing and creating.

Director

The filmmaker returns to her old neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. The footage captures a landscape known as The Gowanus Canal, an area of Brooklyn, which was once inhabited by a productive port and industrial compound. The area is now overly polluted and is officially registered as a superfund site by the US environmental protection agency. Using the Gowanus Canal and surrounding landscape as a moment for reflection on the past, this film addresses the role of landscape and how it can work to incite memory and exercise reflection.