FY17 Individual Artist Fellow John Warren’s 16mm Projects

FY2017 Individual Artist Fellow John Warren applied his award money to work on three 16mm short films that explore the textural, historical and symbolic layers inherent in Nashville’s landscape. The first film he completed, Honky Tonky, premiered at the Nashville Film Festival in April 2017. The growing festival received over 5,500 submissions for the 2017 competition, and 303 of those films and shorts were selected.

The film offers a sublime meditation on the neon signs and country sounds around Lower Broadway. All double-exposures were composed in the film camera while shooting on the street. “As the film traces the geography of the landscape, the overlapping imagery reveals embedded poetry and history,” explains Warren. “I am interested in how layers of film emulsion can reference layers of history, layers of meaning, and layers of perception.”

The second project Warren completed is Future Tense, which examines construction cranes around downtown Nashville. This abstract two-channel video will premiere at Seed Space for the First Saturday art crawl on October 7, 2017. He is currently in production on his third project, an essay film called Frontierland.

An experimental film artist, Warren has completed many short works that seek to question, to interpret, and to express that which transcends language. His lyrical films and installations have been exhibited internationally at a wide range of galleries, museums, and festivals. Warren works primarily with a 16mm Bolex motion picture camera, a technology considered by some to be obsolete, but one he has discovered to be a world of dynamic and transcendent possibilities. Warren teaches Video Art and Fundamentals of Film/Video Production at Vanderbilt University. He lives in East Nashville with his wife and daughter.