Date of Submission

Spring 2016

Academic Programs and Concentrations

Film and Electronic Arts

Project Advisor 1

Peter Hutton

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Artist Statement

Following the rites of the ancient ceremony, I drew down the moon goddess last summer and she made herself in me. The goddess brought me a great joy in the complete beauty of that night but also a great sadness, which incubated in my body long after her radiance left me. I wanted to go back to the ecstasy of my moment with the moon, but she is elusive even in her ever-presence. Regardless, I went on a nine month journey in order to find her again. I wandered through last autumn’s full moons with my camera, searching for what I found in the summer, but the task was difficult. My connection with the moon was disturbed by all the glaring artificial lights that broke the purity of the moon’s glow. Man has stolen the night from the moon and I attempted to escape these false idols and feel the goddess again. Eventually, I found her through my camera lens.

The moon has eight phases but my film has three.

THE FIRST: The film begins with the search to find the moon. The tidal energy that runs throughout the first phase recalls the moon’s powerful pull and presence in life. She moves the fluids that flow throughout my body and I feel her tugging at me and guiding me. This phase is my wandering through a strange night that shines with bright lights that lack the purity and brilliance of that one true light. The imagery is manipulated and artificial, just as the night is. This phase begins and ends with the moving water pulling me towards the moon.

THE SECOND: The new moon is a time of darkness but also of introspection. I drew the goddess down and she was inside of me, even if I could not find her in the night. This phase is an animation which details my journey of introspection, which I begin in tandem with my search for the moon. The new moon phase made me discover that my own mind was filled with useless worries and doubts and when I begin to put them on paper, they built up and collected into the stream of my consciousness, which ran from my brain onto the paper and then flowed into my film. The spoken words are a reading of some of the text that I wrote while looking for the moon. I felt that the two journeys that I undertook this fall were not separate but rather one. The story in the animation comes from a poem that I wrote after I drew the moon down in the summer and it represents my reaction to the events.

THE THIRD: Once I explored my own mind during my new moon, I was finally able to locate the moon in the night and to capture her like I did before. My camera lens found the moon and brought her brilliance to the screen. In this phase, the manipulation disappears and the moon is present in her unadulterated form. The voiceover and animation leave and my breath dissipates and my heartbeat melts away until it is silent and the moon is there alone and majestic.

Moonfall is the feeling that I get when I stare at the full moon and feel that magnetic pull that the entire earth feels and all at once I can see everything clearly.

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