Amelia Garretson-Persans's Projects

MFA Alumni

Major: Animation & Game Art

Graduation Year: 2016

Artist Statement:

AMELIA GARRETSON–PERSANS
A R T I S T S T A T E M E N T

Growing up with an optics physicist and a costume designer, Amelia Garretson-Persans spent a lot of time looking at the underlying structure of things - what happens behind the scenes. As a filmmaker and writer, she digs into the discipline of storytelling as a way to uncover how meaning is generated and stories are perpetuated. She draws inspiration from the history of moving image technology, special effects, and the structures behind engaging storytelling. She uses these devices as a platform from which to question the societal and personal mythologies that envelop her. She uses open-ended storytelling as a tactic to collaborate with viewers, rather than instruct. By inviting viewers to assign their own storylines and codes of meaning to her films, Garretson-Persans foregrounds the process of active interpretation that daily life often buries. By unraveling the stories in her life, she participates in a lineage of women artist-filmmakers who have played with narrative as a way to reclaim the writing of their own stories.

Biography:

AMELIA GARRETSON–PERSANS
B I O
www.ameliagarretsonpersans.com

Amelia Garretson-Persans is a multi-media artist whose work encompasses filmmaking, installation and writing. She received her BFA from Concordia University in Montreal, QC and her MFA from the Maine College of Art in Portland, ME in 2016. Garretson-Persans has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. As part of the Magnaball Phish Festival, she created The Memory Lab, an interactive installation utilizing vintage optical equipment, souvenir snow globes, and live projection technology. She has created a number of original music videos, including one for the lead singer of Tonic, Emerson Hart. Her work has been featured as projection in several live music shows, most recently at the Gullbrannafestivalen in Sweden. In 2014, she was asked by the Nashville-based curatorial collective, Coop, to transform a Victorian mansion using projection, installation, narration, and musical sound design. This spring, she will attend the Digital Narratives residency at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada to begin work on The Sect of the Blue Goose, a novel told via text message by a ghost. Garretson-Persans lives and works with her frequent collaborator and husband, Ian P. Hundt, in Portland, ME.