Experimentation and chance are at the heart of Homegrown Stories, a 13-year online collaborative media project founded by local photographer and video artist Sandy Dyas and filmmaker LeAnn Erickson. Homegrown Stories: The Art of Moving Poetry, showing May 6 at FilmScene, is a retrospective of this project, which was composed of 30 films (chosen from 60) made over a 12-year period.
Every year, Dyas, Erickson and other filmmakers around the country responded to prompts and shot film as part of their everyday life. “If there is a common thread amongst all of us,” Dyas said, “it is the willingness or the need to experiment with the media in making artwork … I think all of us are prone to believing that the process is [the] most important part of making the work.”
Many of the participants also have ties to the University of Iowa’s intermedia program, founded in 1968 by artist Hans Breder as the nation’s first interdisciplinary art program.
Breder’s artistic and pedagogical legacy are “very apparent in Homegrown Stories,” Dyas noted, as is the concept of chance operations, described by Dyas as “anything that takes away from the individual’s ego and instead allowing chance to determine the outcome of the work.”
Homegrown Stories, then, is a contemporary iteration — and continuation — of process art, which originated in the mid-1960s. In process art, the finished artwork/resulting object is not the primary reason for the art-making; the meaning lies in the artist’s observations, the gathering of material and in the making itself.
The aesthetic relationship between process and chance is at work in Homegrown Stories. The project inherently involves an attention to everyday life, specifically those elements of life that may be regularly overlooked. How each artist interprets process and chance within their environment results in a kaleidoscopic vision of the world, whether through the “heightened awareness” of an Iowa landscape, as seen in Erickson’s work, or the “dreamlike vision” of rural and urban landscapes, in Dyas’ own work and that of Markus Haala.
The act of filming everyday settings and ordinary moments, of shaping and manipulating them through the editing process, transforms the everyday and ordinary and reveals some new (or forgotten) truth about life, much like poetry.
“We feel the work is similar to contemporary poetry,” Dyas said, speaking for Erickson and herself. “It is made with the intention of expressing emotion and ideas in a visual way.”
Video captures and frames life’s rhythms and flows. “It demands a level of open-mindedness and attention from its audience. A lot of video art is non-linear and shuns a narrative structure,” another similarity to poetry.
The retrospective is traveling across the country with stops in both art galleries and film festivals, each setting offering different viewing and interpretive experiences based on a given architectural context. In Iowa City, it will be shown at FilmScene, which has the advantage of medium-specific projection. Given the large screen and advanced sound system, viewers can better capture the films’ nuances and details in a more immersive experience than a gallery can offer.
Focusing on the easily overlooked and remembering that the ordinary can be extraordinary is more important than ever, Dyas asserts.
“It’s been very beneficial to me to be part of something bigger than myself. In addition to producing more work than I would if I were not part of Homegrown Stories, I also like that there is a rich and fascinating bunch of art that is being made by a group of likeminded artists from various parts of the country.”
