Christin Call

Filmmaker, dancer, multi-media artist

Artist statement

“As soon as it became apparent that we would all be spending large amounts of time in our own dwellings, I was brought back to my multi-media series What is Home an Obscure Kingdom an Opera Buffa It's You Always You (2016-2018), which explored home as both a physical place and a psychological state.  It was also a highly collaborative and community-reaching project that amassed the kaleidoscopically rotating definitions and experiences of home within the individual and from person-to-person.  What is so intricate about feeling at home has added salience for us in this moment.  I immediately wanted to invite anyone out there with a video camera on their phone to reflect on and respond to the immediacy of being in the domestic space and separated the external and collective sources that inform our identity.  What are the objects, who are the people, and what are the sensations and atmospheres that create the feeling of being intimately and robustly known?  Do we have access to them in our dwelling places?  I asked anyone who would like to participate to send me a one-minute video responding to the prompt, "This is home."  

With the responses I built a database so I could analyze the complexity of responses I received.  Many objects and images cropped up repeatedly, such as children and outdoor play, beds and blankets, pets and plants, being inside and being inside the body.  Themes emerged--including memories and viewing them from a distance, a symbiosis or balancing of self and world, the body as the place that is and is not home, and the construct of home as an idea that can be built and abstracted.  It was clear that these contributors had complex relationships to their homes, as well, so I cross-analyzed this data with an emotion color wheel.  Anxiety, frustration, contemplation, carefree-ness, nostalgia, tiredness, boredom, joy, satisfaction... many contributors explored multiple emotional states within their short one-minute submissions.

In all my work I am interested in the cloud-like contextualization of images, and I tend to create systems that allow me to interrogate their relationships to each other.  Which images are close to the center, which are on the periphery, and what is the link between images far apart in meaning?  We are beings that find meaning by bringing forward the relevant materials in our perceptual processes, and I find this to be an inexhaustible source of wonder and transformation.  I want to thank the 18 contributors who let me peek inside their minds, and I hope seeing what they have shared allows us to find our home in the ever-shifting cloud of belonging.”

How does Art Save You?

“This pandemic is far from me in many ways, and that is a privilege.  It has also taken from me one of the biggest reasons I moved away from the Midwest 15 years ago to live in a larger city--that is, a thriving and active arts scene.  Being part of a community of artists is the thread that pulls me along when I might otherwise feel isolated.  Going to see a colleague's show or a world-class company, coffee dates with artists and friends to talk about projects or the idea of projects, stepping into any dance studio and being a part of a group of people dedicating their time to training and craft.  This is the geography of Seattle for me and at the moment it feels a bit like it's been razed to the ground.  What I can take away from this is how lucky we are in this city to have artists that are still finding ways to make and share their work in this time, and that the innovation of Seattle's artists will be one of the forces that will rebuild our community once it's safe to do so again.”

Christin Call

Meet the Artist, Christin Call

Christin Call is an assemblage artist living in Seattle, WA and making work primarily at the cross-section of dance, film, installation, and poetry. She received her BA in Painting and Art History from Wichita State University in 2004 while interning at Project Gallery and began exhibiting visual work in the Midwest, then later in the Seattle area with representation from Ryan James Gallery. 

Her collection of visual poems made from her own constructed language and handmade paper was featured in Boston Review with a personal foreword from Albert Goldbarth, and she has self-published two collections of poetry as well as been published in literary journals such as KNOCK journal and the Seattle Star. 

As Co-founder and Co-artistic Director of Coriolis, she has created numerous roles including in new works by Zoe Scofield, Joshua Beamish, and Natascha Greenwalt. In over 20 works made for the company, from site-specific installations to films to traditional theater pieces, she has received support through creative residencies such as Project: Space Available, eXit Space Creative Residency, Studio Current, Open Flight Studio’s Flight Deck Residency, Velocity Dance Center’s Creative Residency, and Yaw Theater’s inaugural Propeller Residency. 

Her work as also been featured in many festivals, such as On the Board’s NW New Works Festival 2011 and the Seattle Transmedia and Independent Film Festival 2016, where her debut directorial film Voluntary Caesura received the Best Dance Film award. Her dance films have been also selected for such festivals as the Port Orchard Film Festival and Fuselage Film Festival.  The large-scale installation and dance work What is Home an Obscure Kingdom an Opera Buffa It’s You Always You was presented by Northwest Film Forum in 2016.