ART Habens Art Review ART Habens Art Review - Special Issue #94 | Page 29

Onyinye Alheri
ART Habens
would be better accessed by the audience
through film than through paintings. There
are several painters who have the ability to
make their pieces “move” and seem alive,
but for me it was about exploring and
playing with film to create pieces that still
“acted” like paintings but more easily
induced a trance state, more readily inciting
a breakdown of the “veil”.
Certainly. Canticle was originally a poem I
wrote while I was in high school. It was a
sluggish summer day and the poem came to
me without much effort. It was written on a
small piece of paper that I didn’t look at for
another six years. At that time I was
thinking more seriously about making films
but had only a cheap digital camera and the
film editing software that came with my
laptop. Like I mentioned earlier, true artistry
for me involves using what is available, so I
took some videos that I captured on evening
walks and solo trips to nature and started
playing around with software. As with all of
my pieces, I focused less on an end result
and more on the process. Art is meditation
for me, and the magic is found in the
mistakes, so I was learning to edit not for
sound or visual quality but rather in order to
find and manipulate the moments in each
clip that best captured the feeling of the
poem. Those little details make all the
wasn’t that 2-D work had exhausted its
usefulness, but film opened new doors to
explore subtle movement and the dynamism
of the spiritual realm, something I thought
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