“mother” is my latest and most personal work to date.

My mother and aunt were both given up for adoption at birth. This begins my fascination with their lives. When they were only eight, their father died, leaving their mother all alone to raise the two. She did a damn fine job. But being children of adoption, there was always a yearning of understanding. The idea of being born and given away may seem inconsequential or other-worldly.

Recently, my aunt took a DNA testing kit and found relatives. The twins found their half sisters, half brother, and mother. They met, but that is all. Their biological mother is far beyond Alzheimers’. She is here but she is gone.

I found immense beauty in this situation. As I stated in my writing, “They had their mother, and needed no explanation…” Although it would have been interesting to talk to a coherent woman, I thought the situation was somehow cathartic. If she had not been so far gone, what could she have said?

My project, as a documentary, is trying to understand what this meeting was like. What did it mean for my mother and aunt to meet the woman who birthed them and gave them away. To finally meet her after a lifetime of wonder only to have a conversation with babble. The work began as a written anecdote, not even intended for class, but stumbled into becoming a ten-minute video, rife with music and heartwarming pictures of my mother, aunt, and their true mother.

Music is a crucial aspect of my life. I’m constantly listening to and making, so naturally, it is a ginormous inspiration to me. The Velvet Underground is one of my favorite groups of all time. One song called “I’ll Be Your Mirror” came to me at a time when I was working on my final project. It took grip of me and still has not let go. It is a beautiful yet haunting tune, an element that I thought fit perfectly within the confines of the topic I was documenting.

Secondly, one of my greatest interests and inspirations is the late, great writer, Truman Capote. I had recently been reading his collection of essays and anecdotes “Music For Chameleons”. It is this style of writing I find suits me best. The biggest aspect of my final project, “mother”, is the written piece that fills the second act. It was deeply personal, I had to fight back tears when presenting.

Third, the cinematic aspect of my project was inspired by Jordan Peele’s most recent, “Us”. I would say that movies are as big in my life as music. So in the back of my mind I’m always thinking cinematically. Direct inspiration from this film can be seen in the opening act. It’s long, drawn out to the extent that some may find it slow. This is intentional. When title appears as music changes or is on beat, it does something to an audience. The pullback shot of the dress in the beginning of my project would have not come about if it weren’t for “Us”. In the beginning of this film, there is a long pullback shot of bunnies in, what at the time was, an unknown and mysterious location. Truly mystifying.

In the early minutes of season one episode three of “Documentary Now!” entitled “Kunuk Uncovered”, the narrator of the program states: “In 1922, director William H. Sebastian introduced American audiences to an Eskimo named Kunuk in the now classic film, Kunuk The Hunter.” He continues, “It was groundbreaking cinema, a box-office success, and has been credited with creating the genre that we now call documentary.” The uninhibitedly enthusiastic narrator closes, “But questions about Kunuk have always lingered. What was the relationship between filmmaker and subject? Were the actions depicted real or staged? Was the first documentary a documentary at all? Or was it something else?” Make no mistake, “Documentary Now!” is a satirical show birthed from great minds whose jerseys hang in the “Saturday Night Live” rafters. However, in these opening sentences, a great deal of question is brought upon the concept of documentary. Throughout the past semester, my classmates and I were subject to asking these questions ourselves.

My own process during the semester, the changes in idea and concept, really made me think about what it meant to create a documentary. And once I thought I had made revelations about it; I witnessed my peers’ projects at both midterm and final. From there, the idea of the documentary grew.

Now, documentaries that catch my eye typically have to do with, let’s say, ill-minded groups. I find them fascinating. It’s incredible how with simple woo-ing and LSD that Charles Manson was able to have people commit atrocious murders for him. Even more remarkable how Adolf Hitler convinced many that anyone unlike his kind was the enemy and needed to be eradicated (and also in one documentary I saw that he might have had a unit of Werewolf Nazis, but that could have just been a video game, I’m not sure.) And TEN TIMES more unimaginable are the accounts of neo-Nazis carrying these horrendous beliefs IN THIS CURRENT DAY AND AGE! Essentially, this is what I thought documentaries were about: telling stories of misunderstood (sometimes insane) groups or happenings that hold significance in the current world. But as time went by and I saw the projects of others, as well as my own’s development. I realized that the role of the documentary was much simpler than that.

The questions posed by the narrator in season one episode three of “Documentary Now!”:

1. What is the relationship between filmmaker and subject?
2. Were the actions depicted real or staged?

Throughout the course, I realized that there is no perfect answer to these questions in relation to defining a work as “documentary”. The first question is more of a matter in why an audience would care about a work. For instance, I made a “documentary” about my mother. This is a relationship that a majority of people can understand and connect with. While I did this, my friend Shane made a documentary about a nearly deceased mall in his home town. This is not a typical relationship that most can relate too, but both hold identical documentary merit. Quite simply, there is already a relationship between filmmaker and subject in that the filmmaker has decided to put time and effort towards creating something about the subject, regardless if it’s his mother or his mall.

The second question divides into two further questions. If you are shown an account of something yet it is a reenactment, is it really a documentary? Or does it have to be actual footage of the account? Again, I feel that the idea behind a documentary can bend toward subject. Certainly, it is decidedly more interesting watching the real accounts of whatever it is being documented, however, reenactments and treatments alike are interesting as well. Yes, watching the neo-Nazis romp around moronically, use pick-up lines such as “So, what do you think about white power?” is an incredible sight, but so is the documentary style that incorporates folks reflecting on something. It’s quite the nebulous topic.

Regardless, I don’t think it’s anyone’s place to cast something out as documentary. It’s like art as a whole. What is truly important is the ideas being said, heard, workshopped and discussed.

For my artist presentation I chose German photographer and multimedia artist, Wolfgang Tillmans. He has been a favorite of mine for some time now and is known for his portraiture, still life, abstractions and documentation of the German party scene near the close of the Twentieth century. Tillmans is a curious photographer who has an incredible talent to find the beauty in anything whether it be fruit on a table, a human arm, or the gradient sky. Attached is Tillmans’ “Love (hands praying)” , 1989.

For this project, I wanted to explore what it meant to create a “documentary”. Through essay-style writing, GarageBand voice recording and video production on iMovie I created “mother”. The nine minute and forty-one second video now has a home on the platform YouTube and is public for the world to see. “mother” is what I would describe as an extremely-nonlinear story or even just an account placed out of context. Upon first viewing, one would likely find it confusing. It is in its truest form experimental and challenging, yet hopefully lends towards a very real situation.

The subject of the video comes from both a recent happening and a lifelong journey my mother, Eileen, has been on. Her twin sister and she were given up for adoption at birth and never knew their biological parents. The twins’ adoptive dad passed away when they were only eight years old and their mother in 2012. Alice, their adoptive mother, had always been in full support of them seeking out their biological parents. My mom’s sister, Aunt Kathleen, recently took one of those “ancestry DNA” type of things and found out that she had biological relatives that tested through the same service. As it turned out, it was her half sister. My mother and Aunt Kathleen did some digging on Facebook and it led them to the woman, Siobhan, who told them about their other half siblings and their very much alive mother.

It’s a complicated tale for all sides. My mom and aunt always knew they were adopted and there was a chance that these people could be out there. However, Siobhan’s family had no idea of their mother’s first two children. Could you imagine the questions that all her children had for her? Her name is Marilyn Quinn, and she unfortunately could not answer any of these questions as she is at a very bad stage of Alzheimer’s disease. Recently, my sister, mother and aunt had the opportunity to go meet Marilyn at her nursing home. My sister, Victoria, shot a twenty-minute video on her phone of the event and showed us when they got home. I didn’t know how to feel about it. I could only imagine the severity of this situation to my mother, but her not getting any answers or recognition from her biological mother. In a way this moved me, and compelled me to write an essay. It is my account of the situation.

In a way, I think my writing-turned-video is a documentary about my mother and therefore a documentary about me because, after all, I wouldn’t be here without her personal story.

PHILOSOPHY

I recently read about philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Beetle in a Box. He proposes that everybody is given a box with a beetle inside. No one can see each other’s beetle, yet one could describe it for another. It comes to the point that the beetle in the box is simply relative and is only what we make out of it. I think this documentary relates to this idea because the beetle in the box is like one’s life experience. I have no true way of knowing what my mom’s life was like, but this is me trying to understand what this experience was like based off her description of the beetle in the box.

Spring 2019

ARS 402

Grayson Gallo

February 26, 2019

TITLE: Observations in Color and Light, 2019  

INTRODUCTION: I’ve been taking pictures as long as I’ve had a smart-phone. More recently, in August of 2017, I got an introductory DSLR and started making images for photography classes. I went on in the beginning of 2018 to learn how to operate a film camera. All the while, I’ve felt very inspired. I enjoyed greatly what I was doing. However, I have noticed that without assignments given to me by my professors, I am much less adamant about photography. This greatly upsets me. My goal is to use my camera how I believe one is meant to be used; as an extension of oneself.

Another thing I enjoy but don’t do enough is create audio-visual projects. I spend most of my free time on Garageband creating music which oftentimes goes no further than my laptop. My ADHD-like tendencies restrict me from sitting down to complete a project. Moving forward, this is something I aspire to do. I want to utilize our class’ objective as a reinforcing motivation to have a final product.

With that being said, I have many goals for this project. My first goal is to realize how this project will take form. There will be two components of this project: images and audio-visual video. Ideally, I would like to large-scale print all of the images but due to monetary restrictions, will probably only be able to print a couple, two to four,  poster-sized (24x36in) images. (That is unless I get a grant from the art department!) All unprinted images will most likely be shown on a looped slideshow. However, this makes me concerned with how the second part of the project will simultaneously be shown. I’m essentially talking about a video. For the sake of being practical, I will most likely upload this video on Youtube of Vimeo to be projected. My concern is that in our classroom we only have one projector.

Now, the guts of the project: Observations in Color and Light, 2019. I feel that this is the project that I have been building up too throughout my career in the Stony Brook arts program. From the beginning, I had been more drawn to black and white photography. There was something about the style that, probably because this is how photography started out, seemed more immortal. I could go out and take a black and white photograph today and if there were no telling tech, one would not be able to differentiate decade. My love for black and white photography only furthered in Spring 2018 while taking a black and white film photography class. Afterwards I had taken “Color and Light Photography” in Fall 2018. However, this class dealt with the space of a studio and how to manufacture color and light inside of it. In this class, we were very much in charge of these two aspects. It is here where I stray for this upcoming project. My project will deal with how I strive to further observe color and light in my day to day surroundings.

SYNOPSIS: Observations in Color and Light, 2019 will serve as a project retrospect of my short time dealing with the medium of photography, videography and six year addiction to the Garageband application. In this collection of images and video, I will seek to push myself to not be so complacent with the outcomes of professor-directed projects. In the past, I had only done what was required of me for my photography classes. Luckily, with such an open-ended project as this, I am forced to utilize the camera in a way I aspire to for the rest of my life: as an extension of me. Color and light are the two driving themes of my project. Not in the traditional (class-wise/studio) sense, but rather making images which could otherwise not be made without that exact moment. What I will be capturing is not artificial, and will never be able to be captured again. This is for a documentary course. The location of this documentary is wherever I am. There are no restrictions on time. The output of the project will be two to four poster-sized (24/36in) images as well as a slideshow of at least 25 images. Accompanied will be a video dealing with the same theme. I require no external accommodations or equipment except possibly printing images in our department rather than Staples. But that, like this whole synopsis, is subject to change.

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