Lydia Moyer- 2016

Lydia Moyer
2016 Festival Juror and Visiting Artist

Juror’s Screening: Tuesday, April 5th, 5:00 PM

Biography:
Lydia Moyer is a visual artist and media maker who lives and works in central Virginia where she is an associate professor at the University of Virginia. Moyer directs the new media program in the art department at UVA, where she has taught since 2006 after completing an MFA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2005.

Her work approaches documentary concerns through the lens of art, collecting and manipulating archival, appropriated and original material to play with the premise of non-fiction.  Recent projects – including Paradise, a feature-length investigation of American landscapes – focus on the relationship between landscape and culture with a particular emphasis on how human stories are written (and erased) on the land. Having studied traditional printmaking as an undergraduate at the New York State School of Art and Design at Alfred, she continues to move between book-making using digital tools and video. Writing has become an important part of her creative practice and most of her work involves either written or spoken text.

Her work has been shown widely in festivals and galleries including The European Media Arts Festival in Osnabruck, Germany; The Impakt Festival in Utrecht, the Netherlands; video-dumbo in Brooklyn; the PDX Festival in Portland, Oregon; the Black Maria Festival in Jersey City; Printed Matter in New York City and the Center for Book and Paper at Columbia College in Chicago. In addition to her individual practice, she makes work under the name Hateful with artist Tory Wright and is an active member of the Printmaker’s Left, an international group of artists that produces collaborative books, the most recent of which, Hinterlands, a prototype for life beyond t was completed in January 2015.

Works to be screened:

Paradise
2015, 58m

Produced over the course of eight years beginning in 2007, Paradise is a feature-length non-fiction video that focuses on seven American stories of abandoned sites, quietly investigating their landscapes in order to consider who and what we are comfortable remembering. The narratives include that of Wounded Knee in South Dakota; Centralia, an erstwhile mining town in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania; and the site of Jonestown in Guyana. A communal as well as an individual history, Paradise is a call for solidarity as much as it is a poetic meditation on the past, the present, and the meaning of home in a time of displacement.