OD ONLINE
This year, Od Arts Festival extends online and beyond one weekend. Moving image works shown at venues in the villages can also be watched here on our website, and a number of events including performances, workshops and even walks can be joined remotely.
The Look
Adam Turner, 2017
A short film in which we become implicated in the act of looking at an isolated individual.
Adam Turner’s practice focuses on using conventions of cinema to explore the gap between reality and fantasy, creating an uncomfortable uncertainty in his work.
Content Anxiety
Duncan Poulton, 2019
Content Anxiety is a video collage which uses audio appropriated from anonymous teenagers’ ‘Why I Quit YouTube’ videos. It expresses the paradoxes of making, in an era of perpetual storage, content overload and self-branding.
Duncan Poulton uses digital video and image assemblage to address ideas of simulation, copying and circulation, in an increasingly virtual world.
These Boots Are Made for Walkin’
Eden Mitsenmacher, 2017
A surreal animation pulsating with wit and udder-like toes. To the tune of These Boots Are Made for Walkin’, chosen for its sexual politics and use as a protest song (These Boots are Made for Marching), a woman’s body gradually disintegrates.
Eden Mitsenmacher combines performance, video, and installation to take a critical view
of social, political and cultural issues.
Catherine
Marcy Saude, 2017
A few scenes from a lesser-known Grimm’s fairytale, Frederick and Catherine, are transposed to the West Cumbrian landscape. This film follows a woman’s work and (mis)adventures, exploring low-key folk magic and squatting tactics.
Marcy Saude works with time-based media, with a focus on radical histories, the landscape, counterculture and speculative fiction. She works closely with artist-run film collectives in Bristol and Rotterdam.
Produced at the Allerdale Film Farm.
Redsky66
Ruth Waters, 2017
The artist spent six months conducting Skype interviews with people suffering from severe phobias. Redsky66 tells the story of a man who has Apeirophobia (fear of eternity) and what happens when he sends a viral tweet. It draws on Waters’ own experience of having an extreme phobia, and examines how such anxiety disorders are amplified in the digital age.
Ruth Waters works with film, sound, animation, text and installation. Her work offers critique of the murky uncertainties of our digital era using dark humour and satire.
Supported by the Goldsmiths MFA Studio Award.
The Silent Ray
Rossella Nisio, 2019
The Silent Ray is an experimental video work exploring the desire of individuals to follow destructive paths. It emerges from an album of photographs made by the artist’s grandfather when he was fighting in the colonial war waged by Italy’s Fascist Party against Ethiopia in 1935-36.
Rossella Nisio is a visual artist based in Rotterdam, who focuses on notions of memory, imagination and space.
Industrious Demons
Verity Coward, 2018
Industrious Demons is a moving image work that aims to simulate the tempo of a storm, drawing the audience into the storm’s charged lull where a dog anxiously chews at the grass, before accelerating into a vehicular storm chase.
Verity Coward is a multidisciplinary artist working across video and sculpture. In her video work, Verity asks questions about agency and the phenomena that emerge when bodies, landscapes and the heavens meet. She often uses vehicles and backyard stunts to mediate this interaction, mapping this upward striving onto a lateral axis.
Co-selected with Withkin.
Te Aroha / Cove / Leave your body
Natasha Cantwell, 2013 / 2016 / 2021
Cantwell’s trilogy of films, Te Aroha, Cove and Leave your body, reference classic movie techniques to build tension and suspense. But rather than building to a traditional climax, we get stuck in a feedback loop of paranoia. This nightmare of repetition mirrors the mental barriers that can stop us from reaching out for help.
Natasha Cantwell’s work spans music video, fashion photography and art projects. She embraces awkwardness and draws from the absurdity of human behaviour.