Director: Harry Roseman

Synopsis: Temple of Six Banyan Trees, Guangzhou China. In 1987 I traveled to China, took 3500 photographs, and recorded about 30 hours of sound. It took me until 2019 to figure out how to approach this material. I approached it as a series of animated videos that stand by themselves as individual works and also are part of an overarching undertaking. I have presented two basic rules for myself, and they are that I am not allowed to use any images or sounds that I didn’t produce in China. On the other hand, I can manipulate the images and sound as the work demands. This is an animation made up ostensibly of all still photographs and the sound I recorded. These animated videos are about China, Memory, and Dreaming. Memory and an emotional attachment to place play a huge part in this work. Its subjects include a group of Western tourists in an Asian country. Issues of flatness and three-dimensional space permeate the work. The video centers on a lunch and a trip to a Pagoda and Temple in Guangzhou, China.

Bio: Harry Roseman received a BFA at Pratt. He was a tenured professor of Art at Vassar College. Over the years his art career moved between genres, sculpture, drawing, photography, and video. His work is in a number of major museums including, The Cincinnati Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, The Menil Collection, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Walker Art Museum. Two of his most ambitious public commissions are in the NYC Subway and JFK Airport. Recently he had two small animations at the Blue Star Animation Festival in San Antonio, TX. His work can be seen on Vimeo and YouTube. The video he is submitting for this screening is the 12th in the ongoing China 1987 series.

Program: On The Edge – VAEFF 2023