Art

Video Artwork

Sebring explores sound-image relationships and non-verbal, deconstructed narrative in her video artworks. The emotive subtext is often the primary subject, flipping traditional plot-driven storytelling.

Siloed *2021

Siloed *2021 by Ellen Sebring (10:30 minutes)

“Siloed *2021” is a series of light actions. The artist as time traveller discovers artifacts of 2021, the silo like a grounded spaceship under the starry sky of Otto Piene’s “Star of David” Light Ballet. The Silo Solos project utilizes a pair of silos on the Otto Piene-Elizabeth Goldring Art Farm in Groton, Mass. The work in the Light Silo is a counterpart to her Silo Solos project of 2020—a series of sound actions set in the Bell Silo. For B3 Biennial of the Moving Image, Frankfurt, October 2021.

8ight Circles

8ight Circles, video by Ellen Sebring (7 min.)

“8ight Circles” is a series of sound actions in collaboration with the Bell Silo designed by Paul Matisse. Produced for Silo Solos 2020, a series of solo performances addressing isolation during the pandemic in the two silos at the Otto Piene-Elizabeth Goldring Art Farm in Groton, Massachusetts. Camera by Thomas Draudt. Premiered October 9, 2020 for B3 Biennial Frankfurt

Tilt

Ellen Sebring (video and sound) and Paula Josa-Jones, (choreography), video artwork and performance. Performance photos: Bethany Versoy

“What happens when a choreographer pulls the floor out from beneath her graceful, agile, well-trained dancers? What happens when gravity shifts beneath their feet? "TILT," a new collaboration between video artist Ellen Sebring (S.M.VisS 1986) and acclaimed Boston choreographer Paula Josa-Jones, explores that new frontier. The performance combines large-screen video, live dancers, and a gravity-disrupting mechanism called a "levitron" to discover new realms of movement.”

— from “Un-leveling the Playing Field,” MIT News Office

Aviary

Performance version by Ellen Sebring (video and music) and Beth Galston (sculptural environment), with Sarah Skaggs (choreography and dance), MIT Media Lab Cube. Photos: Beth Galston. Broadcast version by Ellen Sebring for WGBH New Television Workshop.

“Dream-like video piece that includes interspersed choreographed scenes of a single female dancer moving about a dark room filled with suspended, swinging, mirrored strips. Among the scenes, all in slow motion, are: a gymnast swinging, winter forest shots, a young woman in and around a swimming pool, a party, burning wood floating down a stream (accompanied by spoken Norwegian), and sailors sleeping in a small boat. Throughout are interspersed scenes of birds at rest and in flight in an aviary. The loose story concerns a young man and his visions (real and dreamt) of the young woman from the pool. It ends with the man meeting the woman in a city scene. Overall, it is a melancholic mood piece that deals with themes of constraint and freedom.”

— New Television Workshop Collection, Episode 513 (1989), Open Vault from WGBH

Sebring wrote: “Aviary was inspired by a pamphlet I picked up with a drawing of a dove and the headline, ‘Thoughts have Wings’. In the video, the birds flying through the aviary represent the movement of threads of thought within a closed system. Two story arcs converge from parallel journeys—over water and under water—that convey a viscous inner life. Thoughts are buffeted within tidal waves of sentient communication, and only some make it to physical manifestation.”

The Boxer’s Puzzle

Bill Seaman and Ellen Sebring

Sebring’s performance imagery counterpoints the energetic tensions between male and female personae while Seaman’s music provides the structure for intercutting the characters she embodies. Created while the two artists were at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, the six-minute videotape was co-edited by Bill Seaman and Ellen Sebring.

Awarded the Canon Europa Prize, World Wide Video Festival, Den Haag, Holland

Above: images from the video put together by Bill Seaman

“The Boxer's Puzzle suggests an oblique narrative of desire, combining the visual stylization of a music video with a subtle allusiveness and meticulous attention to detail. Using slow motion images and a hypnotic, percussive soundtrack, the artists create a languid, erotic work. A man shadowboxes, his sparring suggesting inner conflict, while a woman is seen in a series of fashion-photo poses, remaining an enigmatic figure, an icon of elusive desire. Seen in isolation, and juxtaposed through syncopated cross-cutting, the man and woman seem caught in the grip of an unreleasable tension, made palpable by the artists' deft editing.”

— description, Electronic Arts Intermix