Commissioned Works/Special Projects is our program offering financial and administrative assistance to individual artists. We act as a fiscal agent for those artists applying for grants from federal and state programs and private foundations. Through this program we help develop collaborative projects between artists and assist with the presentation of their work. In 2019, we have sponsored the following projects:
Shaun Irons: Bye For Now
Bye For Now, is an elegiac new film that offers a meditation on loss, mortality, and location, using water as a metaphor for the variable flow of time and memory. Filmed in Venice, Italy this deeply personal work is an attempt to directly communicate with the dead and to share the experience of a beloved and evocative place with a loved one who is now gone. Composed of meditative passages juxtaposed with quick, rhythmic cuts, the film evokes a mysterious and ghostly maritime city, imbued with a combination of beauty and decay. Throughout the film, images and sounds of life in the city – the swirling green lagoon, the variable Venetian light, the whir of passing boats – are experienced, marking time as the days progress. Bye For Now is a meditative requiem, using landscapes, natural and manmade, as a conveyor of loss and a repository of deep emotion. This project was made with support from New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) via Harvestworks.
Throughout his career, Shaun Irons has engaged a provocative synthesis of video, film, audio and sculptural objects to create multidisciplinary performances, multimedia installations, experimental films, documentaries and interactive video scores to accompany live performance. Irons does not make distinctions between these forms but sees them as deeply interconnected and equally part of his ongoing artistic output.In addition to media work, Irons maintain a daily, ritualistic practice of drawing and photography.