Martha Colburn

Western Wild ... or How I Found Wanderlust and Met Old Shatterhand

2017

Western Wild ... or How I Found Wanderlust and Met Old Shatterhand, 2017 (still)

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Martha Colburn’s film, Western Wild … or How I Found Wanderlust and Met Old Shatterhand, about the famed German author Karl May weaves together a mixture of stop motion animation, travelogue and biography that generates a kind of sensory wanderlust. Conflating past and present, the film investigates issues of identity and representation, as well as violence and war. The artist considers imagination as an invitation to dream, in order to disrupt the limitations of the everyday context and widen her viewers’ horizons. Speaking of the work, Colburn says, “I am making films that work with ideas of the loss of faith, obsession with spectacle, self-destructiveness, compulsion for violence […] Inhibition and fear characterize my work, as uninhibited and fearless they may appear.” Colburn crafts the moving image with a concern for the political issues of a strife-filled world.

Martha Colburn is known for hand-made animations, which she creates through puppetry, collage, and paint-on-glass techniques. She also makes installations and performs her films, often with live musical performance. Colburn’s style of collage fuses pop culture and political imagery with an aesthetic that is simultaneously fantastical, painterly, and punk rock. Many of her appropriated images are painted over with a variety of different paints, which transforms her found material into textured drawings that are completely her own. Colburn’s method of animation sees her face the super-8 film camera directly downward at the collaged panels below. The tactile, non-technological quality that defines her process means her films retain a personal and intimate aspect.

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Martha Colburn Western Wild ... or How I Found Wanderlust and Met Old Shatterhand

Martha Colburn

Western Wild ... or How I Found Wanderlust and Met Old Shatterhand