Jeanne C. Finley

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Jeanne C. Finley is an artist who works with representational media including film, photography and video.  Her projects take a variety of forms including site-specific projections, sculptural installations, drawing, experimental non-fiction films and engaged participatory events.  She is a member of the San Francisco Threshold choir and frequently incorporates the choir and original song into her work.  She has collaborated with John Muse on numerous films and installations since 1989.

Work

Finley frequently begins her projects with non-fiction strategies such as research, interviews, story, and archival as well as original film and photographic sources.  She interweaves these components with humor and imagined narratives, at times incorporating empirical information from the sciences.  Her process is collaborative and she works with other artists as well as the individuals represented in her projects to create the work.

Finley’s early work with projected photographic slide shows such as Deaf Dogs Can Hear (included in the exhibition, Fictional Illustrations of Factual Episodes), 1984 has developed into the continued creation of multi projector site-specific installation pieces including The Adventures of Blacky, 1999, The Trial of Harmony and Invention, Winter, 2001, Catapult, 2005, Sleeping Under Stars, Living Under Satellites, 2010, and the outdoor projection version of Book Report, 2017, for the True/False Film Festival.

Many projects explore sites where the lives of individuals have shifted due to events outside of their control.  The tension between individual will and social/political structures is explored in works such as Manhole 452, 2011, a film in which a man ruminates on fate and determination after a manhole cover explodes under his car on Geary Street.   The Napoleon Room, 2008, shown at the Camargo Foundation in Southern France, uses sound as well as interior and exterior projections on a room where Napoleon slept.  This piece intertwines different narratives of war, including Finley’s mother’s experience at the site when she participated in the invasion of Southern France during World War II.

Finley frequently utilizes the essay format in films such as, Fat Chance, 2014.  In this film she intertwined her footage of a sailboat wrecked on the beach with facts about the rogue wave that had hit the boat and an interview from one of the fathers piloting the boat. He testifies to the power of the documentary footage to help him move from guilt to accept the death of his friend’s son as beyond his control.  

The use of language as weapon or resistance has been a focus of a number of films, including Involuntary Conversion, 1991^[5], Language Lessons, 2002 and, Book Report, 2017.

Several projects, such as Journeys Beyond the Cosmodrome, 2017, Falsework, 2015, and Threshold, 2012, a 3-channel video in collaboration with Mel Day, use public, participatory singing to harness fissures between gesture and voice and to engage collectively in the complex emotional landscape of the sites. The multi-platform project Journeys Beyond the Cosmodrome, 2017, began as a workshop with sixteen teenagers graduating out of an orphanage in Kazakhstan during which they imagined their life journeys after graduating from the orphanage.  For the live cinema presentation of this project, Kri Schlafer composed music from their stories that is sung by Kri and the San Francisco Threshold choir.

Biography

After graduating with an MFA in photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she also worked as the Curator for the Center for Contemporary Photography, Finley returned to San Francisco, her home base since the early 1980’s.  She worked as the Assistant Director for San Francisco Camerawork before accepting a teaching position at the San Francisco Art Institute. Always drawn to stories, and inspired by the Bay Area’s vibrant non-profit arts community, Finley began incorporating narrative components into photographic slide shows and video and started working consistently with installation, video and film, always creating engagement with the focus of her narratives.  She curated exhibitions in her role as board member in experimental exhibitions spaces such as New Langton Arts and San Francisco Cinematheque and made work inspired by discourse with fellow artists such as Mark Durant, Lynne Sachs, Larry Sultan, Doug Hall, Lynn Hershman and Nayland Blake.  In 1989 she received a Fulbright Fellowship to Belgrade, Yugoslavia where she worked at TV Belgrade with Dunja Blazevic, producing hour-long documentaries and original art programs for TV Galleria, a monthly nationally broadcast program on the arts.  She has produced and directed films and installations when working abroad in Istanbul, Moscow, Cassis France, Sarajevo and Kazakhstan as well as throughout the United States.  She continues to work in experimental non-fiction with projects that engages the communities to be active participants in the process.  Finley’s work has been exhibited internationally, including the Guggenheim Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and New York Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, and the George Pompidou Center. Finley has served on the Board of Directors of the Djearassi Foundation for seven years and is a Professor of Film and Graduate Fine Art at The California College of the Arts. 

Awards

Finley has received a number of grants and fellowships, including a Fulbright Fellowship to Belgrade where she directed Nomads at the 25 Door that explored the displacement of individuals from their homes.  In 1994 she lived in Istanbul through a Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fellowship where she directed Conversations Across the Bosphorus, an experimental documentary about two women’s relationship to their faith.  During her Guggenheim Fellowship, Finley co-directed with Gretchen Stoeltje, Arm Around Moscow a feature documentary about an American Russian matchmaking service.  While in residence at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis France, Finley created The Napoleon Room, a site-specific projection work that investigated the wars that had transformed the site, ranging from Napoleon to her mother’s participation in the invasion of Southern France.  At the Headlands Center for the Arts, Finley directed Fat Chance, a short essay film about an incident surrounding a mysterious sailboat that had washed up on the beach at the Headlands after being hit by a rogue wave out at sea. A CEC Artslink Fellowship brought Finley to Kazakhstan where she spent two summers working with 16-year-olds who were aging out of the Akkol orphanage and produced an exhibition of photographs, performances and stories with the kids about their imagined futures, Journeys Beyond the Cosmodrome.  Other awards include a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship, Creative Capital, Cal Arts / Alpert Award, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, NYSCA Award and the Phelan Award.  Her films have been honored by awards at festivals including the San Francisco International Film Festival, Atlanta Film Festival, Berlin Video Festival, Toronto Film Festival, and World Wide Video Festival. 

References

Category:Work