 Artist BIO
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Jason A. Harrington- Artist Biography
Jason Alexander Harrington was born in the old steel mill town of Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. He grew up alongside the abandoned factory and the ruins of this superfund site. In 1997 he returned to Phoenixville and shot a short Super8 film entitled The Old Mill.
In 1996 Harrington graduated from the College of the Atlantic with a degree in Human
Ecology. At COA he studied painting under JoAnne Carpenter and video/performance with the Chicago based artist Nancy Andrews. These experiences eventually led him to graduate school at Syracuse University where he received his MFA in film.
While at Syracuse, in addition to studying narrative filmmaking, Harrington explored a variety of film production techniques including handmade (Great, Great Grandfather and Me, 2000), animation and stopmotion (Origin, 2001). He continues to experiment and combine both cutting edge technologies with old filmmaking techniques and methods.
Currently, Harrington teaches film and video at Framingham State College. Alongside several other projects, Harrington has continued to add pieces to his series of short films entitled Changing Light. “It’s become a long-term work in progress, a kind of ongoing exercise in light and sound, and a way to document the places I’ve lived and visited.”
Harrington’s most recent work, The Tree with the Lights in It, explores concepts of perception through hand-drawn computer animation. He is currently developing several new projects using technologies in an Animation and Multimedia Studio he helped develop in the Communication Arts Department where he teaches at Framingham State College.
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NEWS
Director Statement:
There is an intangible thread that relentlessly appears in my work. It manifests itself in a variety of ways, and appears as themes, motifs and repeating symbols. This largely unconscious vision, which lies as the force behind my work as an artist, finds its way into a variety of narrative and semi-narrative projects. The vision appears regardless of my intensions. It manifests itself in my obsession with science, my interest in natural forms and my love for art history. While sometimes inexplicable or difficult to articulate, this vision or viewpoint informs my style, my themes and my methodology. It is pervasive. Through making art, I reveal my own inner desires and visions to myself. And in this sense I am making work as a way of understanding myself as much as I am working as a means of communicating with an audience.
I am constantly seeking new methods of creating moving images. I am interested in re-coding moving images, in looking for ways to work outside conventional narrative forms. Perhaps my interest in this approach comes from my background in painting and sculpture. Filmmaking is not usually considered a handmade medium, but rather a process of capturing reenacted realities through technology.
The physical medium of filmmaking has great potential as a handmade process. I imagine the works of Pollock, Rothko, Rauschenberg, Cornell, Cezanne, Matisse, and Chagall suddenly in movement. I want to somehow speed up the drawn and painted image, as William Kentridge does, or slow down the film image as if to paint with it as Tarkovsky does.
I love how Andy Goldsworthy both creates and documents with the photographs of his simulated natural forms. I approach my films in a similar fashion, conscious of the process as both creation and documentation. I am interested in looking through the film camera with the same kind of stillness one might dedicate to the painted image.
As our culture participates more and more in mediated experience ... |
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VIDEO SYNOPSYS
Annie Dillard, in her book Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, outlines two ways of seeing, learned seeing and pure seeing. If you’re an ornithologist you see birds. If you’re a painter you notice color. This, for Dillard, is learned seeing. But she suggests that there is another kind of seeing, a pure seeing. She asks what those who have been blind for years and are given their sight back through surgery perceive. What are those first moments like, this kind of conscious perception of the world without the limitations of preconception?
This film is an illustration of seeing for the first time. “When the doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw the tree with the lights in it.” The tree became the dominant motif for the film. First, the tree appears as the classic example used when psychologists and philosophers talk about perception. Do we see the tree itself or our idea of the tree? Do we see the same tree others see? But the tree also appears to the girl as a revelation, as a kind of vision of another world.
But for the first time the girl also sees her mother and father, her sisters and brothers, photographs of her family. The tree thus becomes the first vision of her family and in this respect the symbol of her lineage.
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CREDITS
Directed by: Jason Harrington
Screenplay by: Jason Harrington
Photography by: Jason Harrington
Edited by: Jason Harrington
Music by: Lisa Walker
Prodution: Lisa Walker
Master: 16mm Film
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