Roses and Riots

American animator Martha Colburn utilises the language of film to comment on popular culture, consumerism, politics, sexuality and a whole lot more. Taking everything from Hunter S Thompson to Howard Zinn and The Doors as inspirational sources, Colburn is the contemporary nomadic artist personified. Her work addresses contemporary topics to express personal anxieties and passions. She has shown at the Centre Pompidou Paris, Whitney Museum of American Art New York, and most recently her Super-8 film Evil of Dracula was exhibited at Vegas Gallery, London.

Dazed Digital: What made you want to become an artist?
Martha Colburn: I feigned being a biker chick or a trucker (the two top career options where I grew up), but I was always making art… I was still hanging with bikers, though, who liked my bead-work and painted tree bark and clay sculptures. I just am an artist, but I do say “I will not have a regular job” because I cannot stand wasting my time or having someone tell me what to do, so that sort of pushes me.

DD: There is a strong political undercurrent to your films. Has the global recession made any difference to your work?
Martha Colburn: I think politics are at the heart of my films, and the undercurrents are more subtle ideas of class and sexuality and beliefs and art and so on. I’ve always been in a recession. Most artists are always in a recession, if not depression.

DD: You’ve moved from collages of live-action (paint-on-glass) animations and found footage to documentary filmmaking techniques. Do you attribute this ability to adapt to different working methods to your own movement from Baltimore to Holland?
Martha Colburn: I first moved from the woods of Pennsylvania to Baltimore, then Holland and finally, to New York. These are huge disruptions and I usually go through an awkward few years where I’ll just make music videos or odd films while transitioning. I work on kind of everything – philosophical, historical, poetic and technical ideas. 

DD: Your films are disturbing yet funny. Do you feel humour helps communicate the message of your work?
Martha Colburn: To have fun takes more energy…  to make mischief takes more energy than it does to behave. To put into motion the life forces at work in my films, like a game to figure out how to create it and sometimes I need to have a laugh among all the carnage that ends up happening. I recently had fun making a DEA agent appear to be in a slow-motion modern dance on his way to the ‘big bust’.

DD: How would you describe your work?
Martha Colburn: In my films, my theories have a ‘throw-down’ of sorts, both emotionally and physically. I create the battleground and populate it with a cast of characters that I have felt some kind of connection to during my research – the pimps and priests, the forgotten victims, the ghosts of history, the great artists and the great criminals. My films are like battlegrounds of faith, emotions, landscapes, interiors, time, expression, vices and so forth. I’m tangled-up by what I see in the world as wrong and beautiful.

DD: Using animation means that the images are only visible for a fleeting moment. Does this restrict the viewer’s response to only surface level?
Martha Colburn: The technique of stop-action is close to being an aesthetic phenomenon the same way music is. It’s like when you listen in real-time to music, and grasp emotions and ideas or identify with the rhythm. It can be powerful.

DD: What’s next?
Martha Colburn: I will work on a film that, well, I think it’s a musical, a western, a mob movie, a romance, a crime mystery, a home made documentary, a diary film, a war film – all of these things, made with stop-action technique, but I can’t talk about the subject matter until I make it. Also, I’m doing lots of performances with live music. It is a live show that is an apocalyptic-puritan-puppet-witchhunt-American-Indian-wild-western-protest-re-mix sort-of nightmare, using Super 8 and 16mm footage and projectors.

Martha Colburn is exhibiting in Roses and Riots at the Stone, New York 23 May 09