This 8mm home movie from the JoAnn Elam Collection shows Elam gardening outside her home in Chicago around 1984 and captures Elam’s interest in gardening, farming, and nature in general. The relationship of the film to ” Ice Lakes – Garden 1 ’84 ” (F.2011-01-0104) and ” 84 Garden 2 ” (F.2011-01-0103) remains unclear, though
Shot around 1983, this footage first shows a man working on a farm and it exemplifies JoAnn Elam’s fascination for farm labor. The rest is rather dark, but it seems to be set inside Elam’s house, where the silhouette of a cat playing with a plant appears by the window. As many elements in this
In this footage, JoAnn Elam focuses on a group of African American men picking up a tire, working the land, and taking care of animals on a farm. At the end, a woman who addresses Elam behind the camera is folding the laundry left to dry outside. As in many other elements in this collection,
This footage follows two dogs and two cats around the house, with the camera sometimes zooming in on the animals’ eyes looking directly towards us and on their furry bodies and thus creating a sense of intimacy with them. Throughout these domestic scenes, possibly shot at JoAnn Elam’s home in Chicago, the cats and dogs
“Jack-O-Lanterns” weaves forward and backward, rendering a pair of jack-o-lanterns in a milieu of grainy visual noise from a variety of perspectives-at times obscuring the re-utilized pumpkins.
Similarly to Elam’s other sink-centric work, e.g. “Letters and Dishes,” “Joe and Greens” takes note of a pair of hands in and around a kitchen faucet. At work, these worn hands meticulously prepare vegetables: de-stemming kale, washing (what appears to be) radishes, and tossing lettuce about soapy water. The man on screen is Joe Hendrix,
Opening out of focus, “Joe Cutting Tree” depicts a silhouette, perched on a ladder, sawing a tree limb. Elam cuts in and out, capturing the trimming of several extremities;the perched figure scurries around the trunk (at times climbing onto branches for the best angle). The edits frantically progress into a series of jump cuts as
Elam’s “Letters and Dishes” consists of two main sections. The initial sequence opens on white letters strewn about other clutter. The camera, mirroring the mess, flops about sketching the room slightly out of focus. In survey, Elam lays out three players: a figure donning full US Postal uniform (possibly Joe), a frizzed-hair woman putting herself
Similar to Elam’s “Winter Garden,” “Backyard Winter” surveys fresh snowfall upon what appears to be her Logan Square home, a salient locale in Elam’s work. However, unlike its counterpart, “Backyard Winter” captures its representations at a higher vantage and consists of frantic and (mostly) uninformative pans sprinting across the lawn. Elam slows “Backyard Winter” near
Through a series of pans around what appears to Elam’s Logan Square backyard (a frequent locale in her work), “Winter Garden” meticulously records a fresh blanket of snow. The virgin snow fragilely lies as the camera skims atop recording dead plants and planks of wood that poke through. The majority of pans remains slow;however, as