Mary Beams

With an audio track of children describing their dreams, Beams’s animation depicts them soaring above fields and through the clouds in scenes of youthful revelry.

Whale Songs, the ambitious final film in the period of Beams’s personal 16mm filmmaking, combines whale watching with depictions of the animation process itself. The film was hand-colored in negative color, then filmed on color-reversal stock and printed as a negative, contributing to the film’s singular look.

Described by Beams as an “apology film” created after accidentally killing a friend's beloved cactus, this short work weaves text and image to depict the life cycle of a plant.

In the summer of 1975, with a mobile rotoscoping station in tow, Mary Beams and Susan Hodara recorded locals and tourists alike musing on Paul Revere beneath his statue in Boston. With cerulean-washed frames and shifting white outlines of visitors, the documentary soundtrack creates a unique portrait of place and time.

Squiggling white lines playfully morph and morph again into sexual imagery and suggestive flora, conveying the sensuousness of the natural world.

This frenetic, abstract work, created during Beams’s MacDowell residency, pairs direct rubbings of baby grand piano keys with Super8 footage of the process and a manipulated piano soundtrack.

Reflecting on this deconstructed family portrait, Beams writes, “This film taught me a lot about Time, as I rotoscoped my family at our summer cottage in Indiana. I was at MacDowell during a cold and dreary fall. The hours I spent tracing my loved ones as they sat in the sunlight gave me a powerful tool for grabbing onto happiness. I came out of the summer-light Indiana trance into a chilly rainy New Hampshire autumn, ready to head back to dinner in the dark, and I felt as though I had been with my family all day, in the best place we all enjoyed together. It seemed as though, by spending hours drawing a few short moments in their lives, I could extend their time and mine on this earth. I felt I had control in providing more time to them by drawing more frames than each frame of original film.”

Beams wrote of Solo, “This was a game of cycles I set up for myself on 4 × 6″ index cards. I made a grid, and drew a cycle to fit that grid, and then used each drawing from that cycle as a starting point for another cycle.” Glimpses of nude figures paired with the artist’s humming and domestic dialogue create the feeling of an abstract diary.

The story of a girl who takes a bath, and of her cat who pesters her.

A short poem written by the director's uncle during her childhood is illustrated in a vision of bright nocturnal memory.

Animated film about a cat who climbs into its owners dreams and brings items back to make into a quilt.

Animated film about a cat who climbs into its owners dreams and brings items back to make into a quilt.