Professor Damon Mohl\u2019s films have earned awards at film festivals across the nation and around the world. Last\u00a0Tuesday the Wabash community enjoyed a glimpse of why.<\/p>\n
The screening of five of\u00a0Mohl\u2019s films<\/a>\u00a0in Korb Hall and the tour of his studio<\/a> in the Fine Arts Center drew a large crowd of faculty, students, and members of the Crawfordsville community eager to see not only the films, but also how the first-year Wabash professor of art makes them.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I saw the email, I knew it was something I just had to come see,\u201d said Colin Rinne \u201918. \u201cI thought the landscapes were incredibly intimate, the different drawings and videos that I saw. There was so much depth in it, and the light in it was really cool. There seemed that there was so much more to it under the surface.\u201d<\/p>\n The international contemporary art magazine\u00a0The Grid<\/em>\u00a0describes Mohl\u2019s films as \u201ccombining painting, sculpture and drawing with digital technology to create some amazingly imaginative works.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI like to build sets\u2014I want to construct a whole world,\u201d Mohl once told a reporter during his grad student days at Colorado University-Boulder. Visitors to his studio Tuesday stepped into those worlds, and if their enthusiastic response is an accurate measure, Mohl\u2019s multimedia artistry and teaching hold great promise for the art department\u2019s impact across campus.<\/p>\n \u201cI am definitely looking forward to collaborations with Wabash faculty and students,\u201d Mohl said.<\/p>\n Tuesday\u2019s screening opened with\u00a0The Dust Machine Variation<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0which Mohl created over three years while pursuing his MFA. It includes two life-sized sets and more than 12 miniature sets. A version of this film was nominated for a 2011 Student Academy Award.<\/p>\n The Forest,<\/em><\/a>\u00a0a two-minute, 40-second wonder, was shot entirely on a 12-inch rotating stage containing six miniature diorama scenes. Each scene is but\u00a0six inches wide and three and one-half inches deep, yet the film evokes a\u00a0feeling of being in an immense woods. Mohl said the work was influenced by philosopher Gaston Bachelard and his phrase \u201cinner immensity.”<\/p>\n The Diver<\/em><\/a>,<\/a>\u00a0a\u00a0\u201cfunny yet dark\u201d\u00a0<\/a>piece, was the Audience Favorite Animated Film at the 2013 Moondance International Film Festival.\u00a0It examines \u201cthe inner life of an inanimate object\u201d\u2014a plastic toy diver.\u00a0The Diver\u00a0<\/em>won the Best Domestic Short film at the Autumn Shorts Festival in Kentucky, and was named \u201cone of the best\u201d of the Edinburgh Short Film Festival in 2013, among other honors.<\/p>\n The Mysterious Disappearance of the Town\u2019s Last Resident<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/a>places a cat in the vestiges of Bodie, CA, a gold-mining ghost town with a violent past. \u201cThe remnants of this establishment are preserved in their eternal state of arrested decay,\u201d Mohl said. \u201cIt serves as a perfect setting for a short story about a mysterious disappearance.\u201d<\/p>\n The final work presented,\u00a0The Anatomical Universe,<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/a>examines the life of a man named Edward Hillcot. It premiered in September at the Aberdeen Film Festival in Scotland and begins with this quote from Charles Dickens: \u201cA wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.\u201d<\/p>\n Mohl said he watches “a lot of movies,\u201d but\u00a0his greatest influences in graduate school were Andrei Tarkovksy’s\u00a0Stalker<\/em>\u00a0and the works of Werner Herzog. Herzog actually viewed Mohl\u2019s\u00a0The Dust Machine\u00a0<\/em>in 2010 at the Conference for World Affairs. As Mohl told\u00a0ColoradoDaily.com:<\/em>\u00a0\u201cThat was the highlight of grad school!\u201d<\/p>\n Mohl\u2019s wife,\u00a0Jessica,<\/a>\u00a0is also an artist, creating metal work, jewelry, and combining metal and drawing in silverpoint drawings. The couple presented their work together earlier this year in their exhibit\u00a0\u201cNarrative Forms\u201d<\/a>\u00a0at The Muse gallery in Longmont, CO.<\/p>\n Mohl<\/a>\u00a0is Byron K. Trippet Assistant Professor of Art at Wabash. His classes include\u00a0painting<\/a>, design, drawing, and \u201cnew and expanded media,\u201d a course likely to be renamed filmmaking next year. Many of his films can be viewed online at:\u00a0www.damonmohl.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Professor Damon Mohl\u2019s films have earned awards at film festivals across the nation and around the world. Last\u00a0Tuesday the Wabash community enjoyed a glimpse of why. 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