Shoreline Shorts

Shoreline Shorts is an evening of 8 Maine-made short films and multi-media works collecting a variety of different artistic explorations of the coastal landscapes of the state. Mixing approaches including documentary, video art, dance, and sound, each work was created in thoughtful relation, response, and reflection to specific local sites.

Screening artists include Bri Bowman, Christa Ebert, Erin Johnson & Charlotte Prager, Jared Lank, Liz Mulkey, Ryan Marshall, Takahiro Suzuki, and Tom Bell (with the art of Mitchell Rasor). Approximate runtime of this program is around 70 minutes.

This shorts program was organized by SPACE staff members Greg Jamie and Kelsey Halliday Johnson. 

Films in order of appearance (subject to change):

Liz Mulkey – Blue
Performed and filmed on site at Fortune Rocks marsh and coastal area in Biddeford Pool, this meditative dance film is about clinging to grief, finding your voice, and releasing it in the collective. Choreographed by Liz, the piece features six dancers and is a collaboration with the artist’s sister, Amelia Mulkey, as part of a trio of dance films. 

Erin Johnson & Charlotte Prager – To Be Sound Is To Be Solid 
When artist Erin Johnson and film editor Charlotte Prager moved into a seaside house in York, Maine in 2021, they knew only a handful of facts about the two women who designed and built it in 1971. The two women — art collector Mary-Leigh Smart and artist Beverly Hallam — were exacting about their specifications for the house, and they lived there together for over forty years. In To be Sound is to be Solid, the filmmakers venture to decipher the house’s opaque queer history by studying its complicated and circuitous floor plan. This is the first time the film is being screened locally. | Erin Johnson’s website | Charlotte Prager’s website

Christa Ebert/Uno Lady – Arbor Aria 
Christa Ebert (aka Uno Lady) is a sound and music artist. Arbor Aria features a collaboration with old growth trees in Horton Woods in Saco, using electrodes measuring the tree’s responses interfacing with a sound synthesizer. The resulting sounds are then incorporated into Ebert’s musical compositions. This stop motion music video for the composition debuted this fall as a multi-sensory installation as part of the Akron Soul Train artist residency program. | Website

Takahiro (Taka) Suzuki – Otherworld 
A short in-camera edit film shot on Allen Island off the coast of Maine. The film relates the island’s history to considerations of the ecological and technological futures affecting society today, with celluloid black and white film footage combined with an AI text voiceover. Allen Island is a 450-acre parcel of land that was historically owned by the Wyeth Family, and has recently been donated to Colby College where Suzuki currently teaches film and video. | Website

Bri Bowman – Time and Memory
Bowman works in sound, performance, media and experiences, combined with their background in herbalism and plants. Time and Memory is intended as a looping video and sound installation. This multimedia sound/video work features footage from Travel Pond and Black Brook in Jefferson, Maine. | Website

Jared Lank (Mi’kmaq) – Bay of Herons 
Calling on the strength of his ancestors, the artist reflects on the pain of bearing witness to the destruction of his homelands. The film meditates on themes of cultural assimilation, erasure, and legacy through the lens of Mackworth Island, an ever-evolving landscape here in Casco Bay. This film was selected for inclusion in the 2024 Sundance shorts and will be on view starting in late March at the Portland Museum of Art. | Website

Ryan Marshall – MicroPools
Marshall, a video artist and photographer, has been exploring the Maine landscape through macroviews and its abstract surfaces. With an ongoing archive of mesmerizing videos, their gaze returns again and again to tidal pools, sea life and insects, and the otherworldly coastal landscape. Their work has been presented in gallery contexts and as video loops for interdisciplinary events; a new short-film length edit of some of this mesmerizing, lush, and slippery work will debut with a score by Jonathan Downs.  

Tom Bell – Salt Marsh
With a haunting, original score by Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth), Salt Marsh explores art, climate, and solitude through the reflections of Maine artist and landscape architect Mitchell Rasor. Filmed over the course of two winters at the Spears Farm Estuary Preserve on the Royal River in Yarmouth, Maine, the film premiered at this year’s Camden International Film Festival. This is the Portland debut.

Lead image on this page is a still from Erin Johnson & Charlotte Prager’s To Be Sound Is To Be Solid. Second image above is from Tom Bell’s Salt Marsh.