Orange Glow
A film by Lynne Sachs (text) and Laura Harrison (image)
1 min. 30 sec., 2020
Description
In September 2020, Lynne Sachs was disturbed by the television images of San Francisco enveloped in wildfire smoke. When she looked at artist Laura Harrison’s gestural painting, she felt as if she was watching the eerie skies of California unfurl on the canvas. Together, Sachs’ words and Harrison’s images respond in horror to the devastating ecological disasters.
Text
A face crumbling blueness fragment building crag in fuchsia light is not space but a stroke a swim a brush indivisible from the eye that carves sight some light is bulb and some is sun inside the gem each stroke so different a face in a frame becomes a wistful and also a box triangle home.
Enter fire. Enter smoke from the West caught in the air quality index of a dark 2 PM now hermetic hospitality dust in your lungs smoke in your ears.
Yes, I can hear the ringing in your ears rubbed by this image you made, not really San Francisco now but is for me, becomes that place. Sends me there. Feel the heat. Nothing comes through the fog but the heat, the crackling of the burning brush underfoot, the heat, the worry, and through it all a line drawing itself spitting in motion in liquid.
Laura Harrison: “I wrote a text that became the painting for Orange Glow. Though the poem was supposed to be about air b and bs as escape hatches for covid ravaged California, the poem also suggested fires. The poem describes falling down red carpeted steps for the Oscars into hell. I painted the painting listening to my own poem over and over. My strokes were informed by it and out came a scabrous looking face.
Bios
Laura Harrison lives and works in Chicago. Her animations focus on marginalized, social outcasts with their own sub cultures. These fringe characters provide a focal point for her concerns with diaspora, trans humanism, gender and the loss of touch in an overwhelmingly visual world. Her films have shown at various festivals internationally including The New York Film Festival, Ottowa International Animation Festival, Japan Media Arts Festival, Boston International Film Festival, Florida Film Festival, GLAS, Animafest Zagreb, VOID and Melbourne International Animation Festival. Her work has garnered many prizes, most recently a Guggenheim and Best Animation at Mammoth Lakes Film Festival.
Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. Her moving image work ranges from experimental shorts to essay films to hybrid live performances. She has made 37 films included in retrospectives at Buenos Aires International Festival of Cinema, Havana Film Festival, China Women’s Film Festival and Sheffield Doc/ Fest. Lynne received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts. Tender Buttons Press recently published Lynne’s book Year by Year Poems.
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