Sally Lawton
Directing
Biography
Sally Lawton is a filmmaker and writer born in Detroit, Michigan. Her work combines documentary practice and experimental techniques. She received a BA in Digital Cinema from DePaul University (2013), and a MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2022). Her films have been exhibited at festivals, museums and galleries, including Media City Film Festival, Echo Park Film Center, Onion City Film Festival, among others. Her writing has been featured in Brink Literary Journal and her first publication On Second Thought was published by Diagram Press in 2022. She has curated programs for The Nightingale Cinema, Constellation, Cinema Borealis, and Mothlight Microcinema. She currently teaches at The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.
Known For
The Red Tide follows a life changing move to Florida. Exploring a new home located near famous earthworks by Robert Smithson, the enormous art collection-turned-museum of John Ringling, and beaches plagued by a toxic phenomenon called the ‘red tide’. Beginning with a recreation of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson’s 1969 film, Swamp, the film describes a confusion between multiple anxieties: art’s legacy, climate change, and a longing to stay connected. Taken From Sally Lawton's Website: http://www.sallylawton.net/the-red-tide.html
The Red Tide
What affects me most powerfully: mourning in layers – a kind of sclerosis. Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary Inspired by Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary, the film attempts to measure grief and consciousness in the pandemic through images and monthly recorded notes. The images were recorded entirely in the summer of 2020, while the text stacks together several years. The simple naming and showing of events exposes the banality of grief, but hopefully also the significance.
Garden Variety
"Poetry is in opposition to the truth of the myth" Laura Riding Jackson, This film is inspired by Laura Riding Jackson’s idea that poetry is the only discourse that can transcend myth, but will also always come up against a limitation in language. The built-in poetics of Detroit’s Central Train Station are explored. Henry Ford's influence in the city lead to divestment in trains and the station closed in 1988. In 2018 The Ford Motor Company bought the abandoned station and announced plans to transform it into the companies' self-driving car headquarters. The film tries to undo the mythology around Ford, both old and new, as an anchor for the city. The poetics find limitations in Detroit’s ongoing desire for innovation and growth - often at the expense of truth.
We May Go In a Different Direction
A speculative fiction about Dadaism where Marcel Duchamp is recast as a female narrator. With texts from Rosalind Krauss, Claude Cajun, Kathy Acker and the autobiography of Man Ray, the philosophies, idiosyncrasies and aesthetics of this iconic art movement are revived in a stunning dual projection of 16mm black and white film.
The Individual
"This film is a collaborative installation project with Orleans + Winder (Detroit). It examines Nathaniel Dorsky’s writings on Self-Symbols in film as applied to the exhibition and personalization of clothing. Dorsky writes: If you have ever looked at your hand and seen it freshly without concept, realized the simultaneity of its beauty, its efficiency, its detail, you are awed into appreciation. The total genius of your hand is more profound than anything you could have calculated with your intellect. One’s hand is a devotional object."
Self—Symbol
Glimpses of Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights (1495) are repainted through a VHS video mixing board.
The Garden of Delights
A diary of Christmas in Yosemite National Park. Coastal secrets and transcendental filters fill the frame.
California Psych
A collage of signs, creditor voicemails, and travelogues. A attempt to vacation at work and work on vacation.
Patrick Worth Dying For
Exploring the coming together and separating out of my former self, myself as a mother, and my child during the postpartum period. The work uses reenactments, performances, and home-film to show the strangeness of time dilation, or the inability to perceive and measure time the same way.
Postpartum Film
A meditation on how women traverse their own bodies, through pregnancy and the desire to be pregnant. In documenting corporeal passivity and gestures of desire, questions arise—at what stages do we recognize pregnancy and how do women’s bodies come to matter?
Gravidity Part 1
The relationship between the decline of industry and the cycles of addiction are examined.
Tolerance Radiant
A documentation of parades and protests during the first months of Donald Trumps presidential campaign. The speed at which nationalism moves is explored through manipulated frame rates, blurs, and overlays.
Sky High and the Color of Money
An experimental documentary charting the relationship of five Ukrainians and one Ukrainian American to the 2014 revolution and preceding war. The film is shot over the central and western regions of Ukraine, immediately post-revolution. Six figures explain their relationship to recent events and their plans for the future. The Euromaidan protests are discussed as the transforming event that leads to dense stories of the annexation of Crimea, warfare, and the disillusionment of the USSR.