Filmmaker Jeremy Drummond, an associate professor of art at the University of Richmond, isn’t a huge fan of using the word “experimental” to describe film and video art. “When I think of the term ‘experimental,’” he says, “I can’t get John Cage’s idea out of my mind that if the artist knows what the end result of an artwork is going to be, it’s not truly experimental.”
That definition is too limiting for Frames of Reference, the series that Drummond programs at the University of Richmond—so that’s why he eschewed it for the subtitle: “an annual program of artists’ film and video.”
“Artists’ film and video speaks to a larger body of work and a way of working that foregrounds production,” he says. It refers to work “based on breaking boundaries, pushing new forms of creativity, rethinking modes of working with time-based media, and dealing with topics that are seen as challenging or missing from dominant media culture.”
Looking at the people he’s invited for the inaugural 2023-2024 program—Angelo Madsen Minax, JJJJerome Ellis, Jesse McLean, and Steve Reinke—it’s clear he’s highlighting artists who push, rethink, break, and challenge.
Film and video art isn’t, for the most part, on YouTube or streaming on Netflix—or even shown much in Richmond. To see it, you often have to travel to large cultural institutions like The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York or the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) or attend the Sundance Film Festival or the Venice Biennale. “Access has always been kind of difficult unless there are institutions that are bringing the stuff in. If you’re in a place like New York City, the opportunities to see this type of work are vast whether it’s in museums or people doing screenings.”
The work of musician, poet, and video maker JJJJerome Ellis might fall into this category. They perform at the Tate Modern in London later this year; and Drummond brought them to Richmond in February for “Frames of Reference.” Ellis writes poetry and makes videos that explore disability, storytelling, and language through the lens of their life as a stutterer, among other experiences —reflected in the way they spell their name: JJJJerome.
Like Ellis, Guggenheim Fellow and interdisciplinary filmmaker, Angelo Madsen Minax, regularly screens his work internationally and at museums. Among other works, he showed his film “North By Current” (2021) which aired on PBS as part of its POV series. It’s a “visual rumination” on family, acceptance, the criminal justice system, and other contemporary topics. “After that screening, people didn’t want to leave because they were still processing, wanting to talk, wanting to digest together and think—but people were also at the same time kind of speechless.”
This kind of excited, transfixed reaction is what Drummond aims for—and it has its roots in the first series he ever programmed, Spark International Video, when he was a graduate student in Art Media Studies at Syracuse University.
“People would mail us VHS tapes from all over the world and I would curate a program of international work followed by local work. Because of the size of Syracuse and the fact that there were a lot of faculty, artists, and students there, everybody went. We had screenings with a hundred people. I’d go to a screening in New York City where there were eight people [in the audience] and I thought, wow, something’s going on up here!”
The community building power of art is at the heart of everything Drummond does. From teaching in UR’s art and art history department to programming to his current creative project, “Never Met A Stranger,” a project that is part-publishing house, part-field recording archive, and part-art collaboration with artists and musicians in rural areas around the country.
For Drummond, community engagement is also necessary for some art to be fully realized. He makes a distinction between passively watching video and moving image — think videos we scroll past on social media or series we binge — and “work that only exists as artwork because the audience is becoming part of it.”
It’s in this space, where the audience and artist meet, that a kind of transformation can occur. Making space for transformative art experiences is another goal of “Frames of Reference.” “I remember seeing an early Pipilotti Rist video installation that I must’ve watched on loop for a good part of the afternoon—it was only a 7-minute piece—and being completely mesmerized by it. It was stuff that I wasn’t really learning about in undergraduate art school.”
Drummond says Richmond is providing more and more places where powerful experiences like that can happen. He mentions recent film and video exhibits at the VMFA and the ICA, as well as the Solitary Confinement movie screenings.
“My interest is not necessarily creating a cultural curatorial premise or a mandate in any sort of academic way. It’s about building community, being obsessed with film and video, and wanting to get together and watch this stuff.”
Canadian video artist Steve Reinke rounds out this year’s program with two screenings followed by Q & As on March 26 and 27 at Ukrop Auditorium in the Robins School of Business on the University of Richmond campus. The event is free and open to the public. Frames of Reference will continue in the fall of 2024 and spring of 2025. The best way to find out about the screenings is through the Frames of Reference Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/frames_of_reference_rva/]
