A short semi-autographical, semi-fantastical story about chickens, eggs, magic and genetics.
Written and told by A&D faculty, Nick Tobier.
From the artist:
When I was a child, my grandparents had a painting of someone fantastic looking in their living room. They always told me that it was a relative who had been some sort of royalty. I loved that I had descended from such story-book stock.
Years later, I found a cardboard box with vhs cassettes and super 8 films outside a building that had been the Madison Theater on Grand Circus Park in Detroit shortly before the building was demolished. Most of the footage was a mix of home movies and magicians performing. I thought of the lives lead in these films—someone’s father, grandfather, son, mother, some great tricks, some great stories—and how after those lives had passed, those elements would fade. Like my grandparents’ painting, these were films of people who had been mythic in the lives of their families.
I created this film from a hybrid of that found footage and my own musings on the stories families tell one another to create these myths. Some of the myths were embroidered to make the truths more palatable, and some of this embroidery inevitably becomes more elaborate over time as it it becomes harder to separate fact from fiction the farther we get in time from the source.
Using the metaphor of the magician as conjurer and illusionist, I myself conjured a tale from my found trove and embroidered it with bits of family legacy. Let’s leave it at that. There have been chicken farms and grandfathers and brothers and paintings and magicians. It’s up to you to decide how to use it. Is it more meaningful to know the facts or are our stories how we ascribe meaning to our circumstances?
Nick Tobier is a faculty member at A&D.
More about Nick Tobier.
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