The Starry Messenger has evolved from an interest in the ‘perceptual moment’ of film, a borrowed phrase that is intended to position filmmaking and film watching as an expanded way of thinking in a visual language not limited by strict rationality and simple causality, which engages with the materiality of film as a manifestly analogue physical and chemical process.

The artists featured in the exhibition are: Marika Borgeson, Janine Davidson, Rebecca Meyers, Michaela Nettel, Samantha Rebello, Talena Sanders, Ana Vaz.

The seven selected artist filmmakers engage with what is made visible and invisible in the emulsion and grain and lights and darks of each unique celluloid print, and explore the materiality of the film medium through physical manipulation of film and alternative processes. This expanded understanding of the analogue film-making process has run parallel to a growing awareness that the survival of analogue film-making itself has come to resemble a campaign for a critically endangered species – as film processing labs are seemingly no-longer commercially viable and are closing – and so filmmakers, artists, and critics across the world have had to come together to campaign for institutional support to safeguard the ability to manufacture, shoot, process, print, make and project film.

At the campaign savefilm.org you can add your support to the call for national and international organisations to take active steps to protect the medium of film, and request that UNESCO recognise film, the practice of filmmaking and film projection as world cultural heritage. – Declan Sheehan, curator

Marika Borgeson Biography

Born Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts, Duke University. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

For more information about Marika Borgeson see her website

Janine Davidson Biography

Born Belfast, 1974. MFA in Sculpture at NCAD Dublin, 2012. Lives and works in Dublin.

Rebecca Meyers Biography

Born 1976, New York. MFA in Film & Video Production, University of Iowa 2001. Academic Film Programmer & Lecturer in Film/Media Studies, Bucknell University Pennsylvania.

Michaela Nettel Biography

Born in Bedford, England, 1983. MA Animation, RCA, 2007. Lives and works in London

See more of Michaela’s work at her website

Samantha Rebello Biography

has been working in film and sound since 2004. She lives and works in London.

Talena Sanders Biography

Born USA, 1983. MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University. Assistant Professor of Media Arts at the University of Montana.

See more of Talena’s work at her website

Ana Vaz Biography

Born Brasília, Brazil, 1986. Masters in Cinema and Visual Arts at Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains. Lives and works in Paris.

See more of Ana’s work here

Download the Press Release below:

Starry Messenger Press Release

Acknowledgements

The Starry Messenger was kindly supported by The Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Derry City Council Legacy Fund.