At a glance
“Getting to meet an artist on campus is a privilege. I like to see a variety of things. Seeing the manipulation of colors and the way that he puts it in patterns has me trying to figure out how he managed to do that.”
Ethe Hemphill
Blake Barit, an experimental filmmaker, educator, and researcher, is displaying his structural film exhibit, Index of a Painted Film, in the Bret Llewellyn Gallery located on the third floor of the Engineering Building.
The exhibit explores the materiality of analog film work by showing painted film in multiple ways, offering the viewer different methods of experiencing the work. The exhibit invites viewers to commune with filmmaking and the tactile wonder of material process.
“My aim with this exhibit was to represent the handmade painted film process,” commented Barit. “My goal was to present a work that was didactic in nature while you can appreciate it for its formal aesthetics. As you go through the exhibit you are also learning about the process of production of the actual painted film.”
Barit, who was a college classmate of Digital Media and Animation Instructional Support Technician Vav Vavrek, is on campus for a few days as the exhibit opens to speak with current Alfred State students about his work and review their current projects. The exhibit opened on Monday (3/17) and will be available until April 14.
Barit continued, “This was my master's thesis exhibit so to be able to come to a new area and to a new gallery and set it up in a new location is really rewarding. To share it with a student body and have the work viewed in the light of animation is interesting because it helps me discover new stuff about my own work that I really had not connected with before.”
Ethe Hemphill (Niagara Falls, NY) was one of the students that got to view and interact with Barit and his work. “Getting to meet an artist on campus is a privilege. I like to see a variety of things. Seeing the manipulation of colors and the way that he puts it in patterns has me trying to figure out how he managed to do that.”
Barit is passionate about the preservation and curation of celluloid films and hosts a monthly 16mm film screening. Currently he is exploring the societal shift from organic to digital life and the effect this transition has on the human mind and psyche. He produces single-channel film-based work, installations, performance pieces, and audio experiments.