Visual Arts Professor John Sturgeon’s contribution to the field of video art is widely acknowledged and is included in the permanent collections at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Professor Sturgeon is working with the IRC to produce two new works funded by UMBC’s Lipitz Scholarship program.

Archivist: Cleaving Among the Houses is a poetic video narrative, revealed through a multi-stream collage of individual 4×3 video frame (standard DV video) sequences choreographed within the space of a single 16×9 HD, high definition video frame. In some respects Archivist is an anti-war piece, not for a specific war, but from a perspective that attempts to approach the essence of why war has been an essential expression of the human psychological landscape.

Sam Janesko, a graduate from UMBC Visual Arts program, was the editor for the project, and this position gave him a post-baccalaureate experience in the IRC. The video was premiered in the IRC and was also screened recently at the Maryland Film Festival.