Jeannie Simms
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Untitled (from “Blood Relations”), 2003
© Jeannie Simms
Jeannie Simms is a filmmaker and photographer who is doing a very nice job combining the two mediums, something that I enjoy seeing at galleries and, unfortunately, something that I believe many photographers (including myself) are hesitant to try.
In her series Blood Relations, she accompanies a 35-minute experimental narrative film with 12 photographs. The statement explains her intensions rather well:
Blood Relations… tells the story of a family living on the edge of the Southern California desert. The unspoken grief for the dead father and husband mirrors the ongoing disappearance of natural land as planned housing communities multiply around their home. The film explores the entangled dynamics of the characters in the enclosed domestic environment in relation to the vast space around them. Scenes of their home life are inter-cut with sequences of Lou’s surreal alter existence, inspired by video games’ syntax and action films.
Jeannie’s interest in the ways in which people both shape and are shaped by their domestic environment is an aspect of her work that I admire very much. Her exploration of a modern world that is increasingly controlled by its own notions of success, self, and technology is often haunting and sometimes beautiful.
I have been working with Jeannie on getting a website together for her and today it is officially online. The site is sort of a “teaser,” as it includes only thumbnails with no large images, but you can browse each of her projects and still get a nice sense of the work.
