Mary Beams
2021
Solo
Mary Beams
Beams wrote of Solo, “This was a game of cycles I set up for myself on 4 × 6″ index cards. I made a grid, and drew a cycle to fit that grid, and then used each drawing from that cycle as a starting point for another cycle.” Glimpses of nude figures paired with the artist’s humming and domestic dialogue create the feeling of an abstract diary.
Solo
Whale Songs
Mary Beams
Whale Songs, the ambitious final film in the period of Beams’s personal 16mm filmmaking, combines whale watching with depictions of the animation process itself. The film was hand-colored in negative color, then filmed on color-reversal stock and printed as a negative, contributing to the film’s singular look.
Whale Songs
Paul Revere Is Here
Mary Beams, Susan Rubin
In the summer of 1975, with a mobile rotoscoping station in tow, Mary Beams and Susan Hodara recorded locals and tourists alike musing on Paul Revere beneath his statue in Boston. With cerulean-washed frames and shifting white outlines of visitors, the documentary soundtrack creates a unique portrait of place and time.
Paul Revere Is Here
Going Home Sketchbook
Mary Beams
Reflecting on this deconstructed family portrait, Beams writes, “This film taught me a lot about Time, as I rotoscoped my family at our summer cottage in Indiana. I was at MacDowell during a cold and dreary fall. The hours I spent tracing my loved ones as they sat in the sunlight gave me a powerful tool for grabbing onto happiness. I came out of the summer-light Indiana trance into a chilly rainy New Hampshire autumn, ready to head back to dinner in the dark, and I felt as though I had been with my family all day, in the best place we all enjoyed together. It seemed as though, by spending hours drawing a few short moments in their lives, I could extend their time and mine on this earth. I felt I had control in providing more time to them by drawing more frames than each frame of original film.”
Going Home Sketchbook
