1 Portrait on left is of Martha Colburn
Martha Colburn
Issue #28
In the midst of a hectic year, the Queens animator and filmmaker focuses on artwork instead of busy work
By Melissa Giannini
Published: June 1st, 2006 | 1:12pm
Because she's got her hands in what seems like everything, New York artist Martha Colburn is beginning to resemble one of her signature animated characters, an eight-legged woman named the "She Spider.”
When we talked in the spring, Colburn had just returned from a tour with Deerhoof, where she “film-j-ed” as an opening act. Meanwhile, her collage work was being shown at Chelsea’s Stux Gallery, and as part of the Armory and Scope Art fairs, not to mention the Whitney Biennale. And one of her animations appeared on big screens across the country in the film The Devil and Daniel Johnston. It’s no surprise that the thirty-something has an entire wall inside her Queens studio devoted to a calendar and a claustrophobic collage of sticky notes. "That's my brain," Colburn deadpans, when my eyes widen at the sight of so much to do.
Her studio sits inside what used to be the Democratic Party headquarters for Queens in 1933 and a short-lived disco in the late 1970s. Complete with a 40-foot bar and art deco mirrors and fixtures, it's now a living space for artists. And it's full of quirky tchotchkes — references to pop culture, such as a refrigerator magnet of the Land O’Lakes lady with the butter cut out so that when flipped up, a pair of breasts are revealed. It’s dark, seedy, and amusing like Colburn's work, although she denies that the magnet is hers.
Colburn’s studio floor is covered with images of Osama bin Laden, which she downloaded from the Internet. Layered on each image is an illustration on clear acetate that outfits bin Laden with mop toppers like a witch hat or a toupee. Colburn is planning to use stop-motion animation to morph or "dissolve" images of ordinary people in witch outfits into the bin Laden images as a way of comparing the hunting down of terrorists to the Salem Witch Hunt. She also will include a slowed-down section of an obscure Western in which there's a conversation about which way the invisible villain has gone. "It's nice to see him in a different light," Colburn says about bin Laden.
She developed her acetate technique while studying at the Maryland College Institute of Art. Colburn spent her childhood and adolescene farming with her family in the Appalachian Mountains of south central Pennsylvania. So when she settled into an old sewing factory in a low-rent/high-crime area of Baltimore, she rarely went outside. But she managed to find some old films, a projector, and a splicer at a government junk store. At her disposal, she also had her then-boyfriend's collection of 3,000 porn magazines, which housed the women who would become characters in her films. But she first had to cover the images with acetate so as not to ruin them. She animated the images, drawing skeletons over the bodies by drawing on the acetate, which stripped them down even further and aligned sex with death. “I could have easily cut out the men in those magazines, but I identify with the female character," she says.
Along with the acetate technique, Colburn taught herself how to alter found footage, either by hand-scratching the celluloid itself or running the film backward or at different speeds. During a recent performance, she projected footage in reverse of women wrestling, making the movement look less like sport and more like a seductive, pull-and-push dance of acrimony.
While in Baltimore, Colburn made 40 films, countless records, and record covers and she recorded and toured with punk band the Dramatics. She also worked odd jobs to finance her career, such as counting traffic for the state. In 2000, she received a two-year art residency in Amsterdam and a grant to make a 35 mm version of Cosmetic Emergency, her film about cosmetic surgery and the politics and morals involved. Less than a year ago, she relocated to New York, where she's been working nonstop ever since. She has been so busy that it doesn't take her long to answer a question about whether she might ever return to the odd jobs to "feed" her work.
"No," she says with conviction. "I'll just have to choose to be taken advantage of in a different realm. My only strand of consistency in my life has been my work, so maybe that's why I keep doing it."
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