Margaret Rorison
2021Her moving image work has been exhibited at Anthology Film Archives, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Images Festival, Miami PULSE Art Fair, Mono No Aware VI & VII, Microscope Gallery, The Moscow Museum of Modern Art, The National Gallery of Art, and The Walker Art Center. Rorison won The 2018 Baker Artist Award for Film, she is a recipient of a 2016 Rubys Artist Project Grants, a recipient of The 2019 and 2016 Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Awards and a 2015 Sondheim Semi-finalist. She is the co-founder and curator of the film series Sight Unseen which focuses on bringing contemporary image-based work to Baltimore. The series started as a roaming entity in 2012 and now has a permanent home at The SNF Parkway Theatre in Baltimore City.
She works as an audiovisual specialist at The National Gallery of Art and teaches filmmaking and photography at The Baltimore School for the Arts, The Maryland Institute College of Art and Anne Arundel Community College.
Sympathetic Bodies
Margaret Rorison
"Sympathetic Bodies" (Official Video) by Byron Westbrook from Body Consonance LP (2017) on Hands in the Dark Records Hand-processed and shot on BW Reversal film Made with the support from Crater Lab in Barcelona. Scanned by Colorlab in Rockville, MD
Sympathetic Bodies
The Waiting Sands
Margaret Rorison
My grandfather, Harry Bennett was a huge influence on me as a young artist and thinker. He was a painter and had made a living as an illustrator for gothic and romance novels in the 1960s. In the last month of his life, he was omitted to the hospital with terminal conditions. Unable to film him, I began to capture the harvest moon outside his bedroom window as a way to cope with the emotions I was experiencing. A few hours after the footage had been shot, my grandfather passed away. This footage serves as a document of his last breaths.
The Waiting Sands
vindmøller
Margaret Rorison
A study of the monolithic wind turbines along the shores of Amager, Copenhagen, Denmark. Triple exposed on one roll of color film, then finding four generations of grain. The soundtrack is a recorded live-improvisation by artist Mario de Vega using unstable media and acoustic resonators.
vindmøller
Pull/Drift
Margaret Rorison
This film documents a unique choreographed performance that took place one late summer afternoon in Patapsco State Park in Baltimore, Maryland. Choreographed by Clarissa Stowell Gregory and performed by The Effervescent Collective. Soundtrack composed by Josh Millrod.
PULL/DRIFT
DER SPAZIERGANG
Margaret Rorison
This film documents long walks throughout Berlin, Germany during the cold days of April, 2013. The film is edited in camera and composed of single frame snapshots along with longer moments of glance, captured on one 100’ roll of film. The title comes from a story by Robert Walser.
DER SPAZIERGANG
Gowanus Haze
Margaret Rorison
The filmmaker returns to her old neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. The footage captures a landscape known as The Gowanus Canal, an area of Brooklyn, which was once inhabited by a productive port and industrial compound. The area is now overly polluted and is officially registered as a superfund site by the US environmental protection agency. Using the Gowanus Canal and surrounding landscape as a moment for reflection on the past, this film addresses the role of landscape and how it can work to incite memory and exercise reflection.
Gowanus Haze
