Art

Exit /Atmosphere

Exit /Atmosphere by Ellen Sebring (Silo Solos part 3, 2024, 8 minutes)

The third part of Sebring’s silo trilogy emerges from the silos to rediscover the earth as a sphere shrouded in layers of atmosphere. Featuring Elizabeth Hua Olson. B3 Festival of the Moving Image, Frankfurt am Main, October 2024.

Siloed *2021

Siloed *2021 by Ellen Sebring (Silo Solos part 2, 2021, 10:30 minutes)

“Siloed *2021” is a series of light actions in the silo containing Otto Piene’s “Star of David” Light Ballet. Like a spaceship landed under the starry sky, the silo holds artifacts of 2021. B3 Festival of the Moving Image, Frankfurt am Main, October 2021.

8ight Circles

8ight Circles, video by Ellen Sebring (Silo Solos part 1, 2020, 7 min.)

“8ight Circles” is a series of sound actions in collaboration with the Bell Silo designed by Paul Matisse. Produced for Silo Solos 2020, a series of solo performances addressing isolation during the pandemic in the two silos at the Otto Piene-Elizabeth Goldring Art Farm in Groton, Massachusetts. Camera by Thomas Draudt. Premiered as part of a virtual festival, globally broadcast on October 9, 2020 by the B3 Festival of the Moving Image, Frankfurt am Main.

Tilt

Ellen Sebring (video and sound) and Paula Josa-Jones, (choreography), video artwork and performance. Performance photos above: Bethany Versoy

“What happens when a choreographer pulls the floor out from beneath her graceful, agile, well-trained dancers? What happens when gravity shifts beneath their feet? "TILT," a new collaboration between video artist Ellen Sebring (S.M.VisS 1986) and acclaimed Boston choreographer Paula Josa-Jones, explores that new frontier. The performance combines large-screen video, live dancers, and a gravity-disrupting mechanism called a "levitron" to discover new realms of movement.”

— from “Un-leveling the Playing Field,” MIT News Office

Aviary

Performance version by Ellen Sebring (video and music) and Beth Galston (sculptural environment), with Sarah Skaggs (choreography and dance), MIT Media Lab Cube. Above photos of Aviary performance: Beth Galston

Broadcast version by Ellen Sebring for WGBH New Television Workshop. Sebring wrote: “Aviary was inspired by a pamphlet I picked up with a drawing of a dove and the headline, ‘Thoughts have Wings’. In the video, the birds flying through the aviary represent the movement of threads of thought within a closed system. Two story arcs converge from parallel journeys—over water and under water—that convey a viscous inner life. Thoughts are buffeted within tidal waves of sentient communication, and only some make it to physical manifestation.”

“Dream-like video piece that includes interspersed choreographed scenes of a single female dancer moving about a dark room filled with suspended, swinging, mirrored strips. Among the scenes, all in slow motion, are: a gymnast swinging, winter forest shots, a young woman in and around a swimming pool, a party, burning wood floating down a stream (accompanied by spoken Norwegian), and sailors sleeping in a small boat. Throughout are interspersed scenes of birds at rest and in flight in an aviary. The loose story concerns a young man and his visions (real and dreamt) of the young woman from the pool. It ends with the man meeting the woman in a city scene. Overall, it is a melancholic mood piece that deals with themes of constraint and freedom.”

— New Television Workshop Collection, Episode 513 (1989), Open Vault from WGBH

The Boxer’s Puzzle

Bill Seaman and Ellen Sebring

Sebring’s performance imagery counterpoints the energetic tensions between male and female personae while Seaman’s music provides the structure for intercutting the characters she embodies. Created while the two artists were at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, the six-minute videotape was co-edited by Bill Seaman and Ellen Sebring. Awarded the Canon Europa Prize, World Wide Video Festival, Den Haag, Holland. Above: images from the video put together by Bill Seaman

“The Boxer's Puzzle suggests an oblique narrative of desire, combining the visual stylization of a music video with a subtle allusiveness and meticulous attention to detail. Using slow motion images and a hypnotic, percussive soundtrack, the artists create a languid, erotic work. A man shadowboxes, his sparring suggesting inner conflict, while a woman is seen in a series of fashion-photo poses, remaining an enigmatic figure, an icon of elusive desire. Seen in isolation, and juxtaposed through syncopated cross-cutting, the man and woman seem caught in the grip of an unreleasable tension, made palpable by the artists' deft editing.”

— description, Electronic Arts Intermix

Dive

Ellen Sebring (video and music) and Paula Josa-Jones (performer and choreographer), soundtrack composed at The Banff Centre, Canada

“video dance . . . study of a woman's life, in which the viewer "dives" into fragmentary episodes and memories . . . inspired by the collaboration with photographer Pam White, which took place at the artist colony in Palenville, New York.”

— Paula Josa-Jones