Martha Colburn
Encyclopedia
Martha Colburn is a filmmaker and artist. She is best known for her animation films, which are created through puppetry, collage, and paint on glass techniques. She has made over forty films since 1994. Colburn has also been fervently involved in playing music. One out of numerous groups she has been a part of is The Dramatics
, a band she formed in Baltimore with Jason Willett
. Recently in her career, Colburn has made sculptural/video installation work and experimented with integrating her films with musical performance. Yet music and film have always shared a deep connection within Colburn’s work.
and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
. She began making art at a very young age, but did not start working with film until 1994. In an interview with Blank Screen Media, Colburn discusses her past and present influences for making art: “In high school it was politics and history and then in my twenties I made tons of music films (many sexually oriented) and now I am back to the politics and history.”
In 1990, Colburn left the Appalachians to attend the Maryland Institute College of Art
in Baltimore. Her primary focus in school was visual arts, yet she also began to become involved in the Baltimore experimental music
scene. Colburn’s reflections upon four years of art school
are not so pleasant. “Art school sort of devastated my vision, whatever I had,” she is quoted saying in an article published by Res Magazine about her life and work. Although disillusioned by the time she graduates in 1994, Colburn nevertheless decides to stay in Baltimore and further immerse herself in the city’s artistic community.
It is around the time of finishing college that Colburn first begins working with film. Her motivation to work with film arises partially due to finding 16mm reels of old educational movies. Acrophobic Babies and Feature Presentation are two early examples of Colburn working within this process. By scratching, tinting, and splicing the film itself, Colburn makes her first filmic pieces through her manipulation of appropriated imagery.
After discovering Super-8
in 1995, Colburn switched from 16mm to 8mm. Her initial explorations in puppetry and animation are simultaneous with her shift in film formats. Caffeine Jam is one of her first animations, while Killer Tunes is animation using marionettes. Colburn continues to develop and enrich her animations to an even greater complexity of form, materials, and concepts. During an interview with Metropolis M Magazine, Colburn asserts her love for animation: “animation is magical, it’s making gold out of glitter.”
After ten years of living in Baltimore, Colburn moves to Amsterdam in 2000 after being offered a two-year residency at the Rijksakademie
. During her residency, Colburn makes numerous films including Skelehellavision, an animated and hand-colored
film mixing images of female pornography stars and skulls, and Big Bug Attack, a film whose soundtrack is a collaborative piece between Colburn and German techno artist Felix Kubin
. Once finishing up her residency, Colburn spends another three years in Holland making films until returning to the United States in 2005.
Once settling between Long Island City, New York and Amsterdam, NL, Colburn begins work on animations that deal more closely with American history and its relationship to the country’s current foreign and domestic policies. Destiny Manifesto incorporates images of the American frontier with depictions of the conflict in the Middle East. Meet Me in Wichita is a parody of The Wizard of Oz in which Osama Bin Laden
substitutes for all of Oz’s characters aside from Dorothy, the story’s heroine. “I am making films that work with ideas of the loss of faith, obsession with spectacle, self destructiveness, compulsion for violence,” Colburn says in Metropolis M Magazine about her work of most recent years. “Inhibition and fear characterize my work, as uninhibited and fearless they may appear.” As far as the effects of returning to her native country after spending time in Europe, Colburn believes her work has gotten increasingly concerned with political issues facing the world today.
Colburn has also made animations for music video
s. She created pieces to accompany the San Francisco-based band Deerhoof
’s song “Wrong Time Capsule” in 2005 and Serj Tankian
’s “Lie, Lie, Lie” in 2007. Yet these projects come as no surprise given the strong relationship Colburn has always had with music. She even created animation for the 2005 documentary about the musician Daniel Johnston
entitled The Devil and Daniel Johnston
. Colburn’s latest film, Myth Labs, has not just been screened, but also presented as panels of which the film is composed.
and political imagery with an aesthetic that is simultaneously fantastical, painterly, and punk rock
. Many of her appropriated images are painted over with a diverse variety of paints which integrate them with the drawings and textures that are completely her own. Colburn makes her animations by facing the camera directly downward at the collaged panels below. She has always rejected the computer program as a means to create her animations. The “hands-on,” non-technological quality that defines her process keeps it at a personal and intimate level. Color is another very important aspect of Colburn’s films. Although her 2006 film Meet Me in Wichita deals with disconcerting subject matter, Colburn still chooses bright colors to define the film’s color scheme
. It is these types of contradictions in Colburn’s work which deepen her visual and conceptual complexity. Colburn was featured in the April 2011 issue of Art In America.
The Dramatics
The Dramatics are an American soul music vocal group, formed in Detroit, Michigan in 1962. They are best known for their 1970s hit songs "In the Rain" and "Whatcha See is Whatcha Get", both of which were #1 R&B and Top 10 Pop hits.-Career:The Dramatics originally formed in 1962 recording as the...
, a band she formed in Baltimore with Jason Willett
Jason Willett
Jason Willett is an American musician, known largely for his work with experimental rock groups including Half Japanese, Can Openers, Pleasant Livers, X-Ray Eyes, The Dramatics, The Jaunties, The Attitude Robots, Leprechaun Catering, and many more...
. Recently in her career, Colburn has made sculptural/video installation work and experimented with integrating her films with musical performance. Yet music and film have always shared a deep connection within Colburn’s work.
Biography
Colburn was born in 1972 and spent her childhood near the Appalachian Mountains between GettysburgGettysburg
-Events:* Gettysburg Campaign, a series of American Civil War military engagements in the Main Eastern Theater** Battle of Gettysburg, July 1-3 military engagements during the 1863 Gettysburg Campaign...
and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Harrisburg is the capital of Pennsylvania. As of the 2010 census, the city had a population of 49,528, making it the ninth largest city in Pennsylvania...
. She began making art at a very young age, but did not start working with film until 1994. In an interview with Blank Screen Media, Colburn discusses her past and present influences for making art: “In high school it was politics and history and then in my twenties I made tons of music films (many sexually oriented) and now I am back to the politics and history.”
In 1990, Colburn left the Appalachians to attend the Maryland Institute College of Art
Maryland Institute College of Art
Maryland Institute College of Art is an art and design college in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. It was founded in 1826 as the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts, making it one of the first and oldest art colleges in the United States. In 2008, MICA was ranked #2 in the nation...
in Baltimore. Her primary focus in school was visual arts, yet she also began to become involved in the Baltimore experimental music
Experimental music
Experimental music refers, in the English-language literature, to a compositional tradition which arose in the mid-20th century, applied particularly in North America to music composed in such a way that its outcome is unforeseeable. Its most famous and influential exponent was John Cage...
scene. Colburn’s reflections upon four years of art school
Art school
Art school is a general term for any educational institution with a primary focus on the visual arts, especially illustration, painting, photography, sculpture, and graphic design. The term applies to institutions with elementary, secondary, post-secondary or undergraduate, or graduate or...
are not so pleasant. “Art school sort of devastated my vision, whatever I had,” she is quoted saying in an article published by Res Magazine about her life and work. Although disillusioned by the time she graduates in 1994, Colburn nevertheless decides to stay in Baltimore and further immerse herself in the city’s artistic community.
It is around the time of finishing college that Colburn first begins working with film. Her motivation to work with film arises partially due to finding 16mm reels of old educational movies. Acrophobic Babies and Feature Presentation are two early examples of Colburn working within this process. By scratching, tinting, and splicing the film itself, Colburn makes her first filmic pieces through her manipulation of appropriated imagery.
After discovering Super-8
Super 8 mm film
Super 8 mm film is a motion picture film format released in 1965 by Eastman Kodak as an improvement of the older "Double" or "Regular" 8 mm home movie format....
in 1995, Colburn switched from 16mm to 8mm. Her initial explorations in puppetry and animation are simultaneous with her shift in film formats. Caffeine Jam is one of her first animations, while Killer Tunes is animation using marionettes. Colburn continues to develop and enrich her animations to an even greater complexity of form, materials, and concepts. During an interview with Metropolis M Magazine, Colburn asserts her love for animation: “animation is magical, it’s making gold out of glitter.”
After ten years of living in Baltimore, Colburn moves to Amsterdam in 2000 after being offered a two-year residency at the Rijksakademie
Rijksakademie
The Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten is a two-year residency for visual artists, based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.Funded by the Dutch government, residents are granted a stipend and are allotted a personal studio in the former military barracks building in which the Rijksakademie is housed...
. During her residency, Colburn makes numerous films including Skelehellavision, an animated and hand-colored
Hand-colouring
Hand-colouring refers to any method of manually adding colour to a black-and-white photograph, generally either to heighten the realism of the photograph or for artistic purposes...
film mixing images of female pornography stars and skulls, and Big Bug Attack, a film whose soundtrack is a collaborative piece between Colburn and German techno artist Felix Kubin
Felix Kubin
Felix Kubin is an electronic musician. He has been involved with music since he was 8 years old, when he studied piano, organ and glockenspiel. His youthful experiments really took off in 1980 when he got a Korg MS-20 synthesizer. His early works have been released under the title The Tetchy...
. Once finishing up her residency, Colburn spends another three years in Holland making films until returning to the United States in 2005.
Once settling between Long Island City, New York and Amsterdam, NL, Colburn begins work on animations that deal more closely with American history and its relationship to the country’s current foreign and domestic policies. Destiny Manifesto incorporates images of the American frontier with depictions of the conflict in the Middle East. Meet Me in Wichita is a parody of The Wizard of Oz in which Osama Bin Laden
Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden was the founder of the militant Islamist organization Al-Qaeda, the jihadist organization responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States and numerous other mass-casualty attacks against civilian and military targets...
substitutes for all of Oz’s characters aside from Dorothy, the story’s heroine. “I am making films that work with ideas of the loss of faith, obsession with spectacle, self destructiveness, compulsion for violence,” Colburn says in Metropolis M Magazine about her work of most recent years. “Inhibition and fear characterize my work, as uninhibited and fearless they may appear.” As far as the effects of returning to her native country after spending time in Europe, Colburn believes her work has gotten increasingly concerned with political issues facing the world today.
Colburn has also made animations for music video
Music video
A music video or song video is a short film integrating a song and imagery, produced for promotional or artistic purposes. Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a marketing device intended to promote the sale of music recordings...
s. She created pieces to accompany the San Francisco-based band Deerhoof
Deerhoof
Deerhoof is a musical group consisting of Satomi Matsuzaki, John Dieterich, Ed Rodriguez and Greg Saunier.-Origins:In 1992, Greg Saunier, having recently graduated with a degree in music composition from Oberlin Conservatory of Music, joined a short-lived San Francisco quartet called Nitre Pit, on...
’s song “Wrong Time Capsule” in 2005 and Serj Tankian
Serj Tankian
Serj Tankian is a Lebanese-born Armenian-American singer–songwriter, composer, multi-instrumentalist, playwright, record producer, poet, and political activist...
’s “Lie, Lie, Lie” in 2007. Yet these projects come as no surprise given the strong relationship Colburn has always had with music. She even created animation for the 2005 documentary about the musician Daniel Johnston
Daniel Johnston
Daniel Dale Johnston is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and artist. Johnston was the subject of the 2006 documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston. He currently lives in Waller, Texas....
entitled The Devil and Daniel Johnston
The Devil and Daniel Johnston
The Devil and Daniel Johnston is a 2006 documentary film about the noted American artist Daniel Johnston. It chronicles Johnston's life from childhood up to the present, with an emphasis on his experiences with bipolar disorder, and how it manifested itself in demonic self-obsession. The film was...
. Colburn’s latest film, Myth Labs, has not just been screened, but also presented as panels of which the film is composed.
Collage work
Colburn’s style of collage fuses pop culturePopular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...
and political imagery with an aesthetic that is simultaneously fantastical, painterly, and punk rock
Punk rock
Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock and other forms of what is now known as protopunk music, punk rock bands eschewed perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock...
. Many of her appropriated images are painted over with a diverse variety of paints which integrate them with the drawings and textures that are completely her own. Colburn makes her animations by facing the camera directly downward at the collaged panels below. She has always rejected the computer program as a means to create her animations. The “hands-on,” non-technological quality that defines her process keeps it at a personal and intimate level. Color is another very important aspect of Colburn’s films. Although her 2006 film Meet Me in Wichita deals with disconcerting subject matter, Colburn still chooses bright colors to define the film’s color scheme
Color scheme
In color theory, a color scheme is the choice of colors used in design for a range of media. For example, the use of a white background with black text is an example of a basic and commonly default color scheme in web design....
. It is these types of contradictions in Colburn’s work which deepen her visual and conceptual complexity. Colburn was featured in the April 2011 issue of Art In America.
Films
- 2011 'Anti-Fracture Mining Film'
- 2010 'DOLLS VS. DICTATORS'
- 2009 'Triumph of the Wild'
- 2009 'Join the Freedom Force'
- 2009 'Electric Literature'
- 2008 'Myth Labs'
- 2007 'Don't Kill the Weatherman!'
- 2007 'Dispel'
- 2007 'Lie, Lie, Lie'
- 2006 'Meet Me In Wichita'
- 2006 'Destiny Manifesto'
- 2006 'Waschdrang Mama'
- 2005 'Wrong Time Capsule'
- 2005 'Cosmetic Emergency'
- 2004 'A Little Dutch Thrill'
- 2004 'XXX Amsterdam'
- 2003 'Secrets of Mexuality'
- 2002 'Groscher Lansangriff: Big Bug Attack'
- 2002 'Cats Amore'
- 2001 'Skelehellavision'
- 2000 'Spiders In Love: An Arachnogasmic Musical'
- 1999 'Lift Off'
- 1998 'A Toetally Solefull Feeture Pedsintation'
- 1998 'There's A Pervert In Our Pool!'
- 1997 'What's On?'
- 1997 'Evil Of Dracula'
- 1997 'Ode To A Busdriver'
- 1997 'I Can't Keep Up'
- 1997 'Persecution in Paradise'
- 1996 'Cholesterol'
- 1996 'Dog Chow'
- 1996 'Hey Tiger'
- 1996 'Uberfall: Pee Poo and Flies'
- 1996 'I'm Gonna'
- 1996 'My Secret Shame'
- 1996 'Who Knows?'
- 1996 'Kiwi and Wally'
- 1996 'Killer Tunes'
- 1995 'Improvisation'
- 1995 'Caffine Jam'
- 1995 'Caroline Kraabel Solo'
- 1995 'Zig Zag'
- 1995 'Live Frazz'
- 1995 'Asthma'
- 1995 'Alcohol'
- 1994 'Feature Presentation'
- 1994 'First Film In X-Tro'
- 1994 'Acrophobic Babies'