Film Commissions

Ephraim Asili chose to focus on Five Swords (1976), a monumental stabile that has been part of the bucolic Storm King Art Center landscape since 1988. Asili lives nearby and contemplated the sculpture as an element of his own environment in Calder for Peter. “My films almost never focus on these beautiful landscapes; it’s something that I try to avoid because it feels too easy, living where I do,” says Asili. “On the other hand, I’ve always wanted to make work like that. This felt like the perfect opportunity to indulge that.” In doing so, he used the lens of filmmaker Peter Hutton, for whom the film was named and whose own work often references the Hudson River School of painting and considers that particular landscape. Asili’s film is primarily shot in the sculpture’s immediate vicinity but also considers its larger surroundings, from fog consuming the Hudson River to a Metro North train trudging northward through the snow.

Rosa Barba chose to focus on the hanging mobile Untitled (c. 1968), a light-reflecting work whose unpainted elements emanate radiant energy. With few exceptions, the sculpture has hung in Calder’s Roxbury studio since it was made more than fifty years ago. It captured Barba’s attention when she first visited the space: “I like that it doesn’t have a title and is a kind of observer of the production place,” says Barba. “It was really amazing to see the studio and how everything is left untouched. This idea came to activate and bring back the working relationship with all the objects inside.” Enigmatic Whisper became a portrait of the entire studio, with Barba bringing life back into the space by way of her camera and by setting the mobile and other sculptures in motion.

Lucy Raven chose to focus on Calder’s sound-making standing mobile Chef d’orchestre (1966), which was commissioned by Diego Masson and composer Earle Brown to act as both an instrument and a conductor in Brown’s Calder Piece (1963–66). “He was mesmerized [by Calder’s mobiles] because all of their forms move both independently and in conjunction with each other, which is how [Brown] wanted his compositions,” says Raven. In Shape Notes, she animates a series of still images taken during a 2016 performance of Calder Piece at Friends Seminary in New York. Used throughout Raven’s practice, this technique magnetically reimagines the open-form composer’s fusion of percussion and sculpture.

Agnès Varda chose to focus on the hanging mobile Vertical Foliage (1941), which she came across during a visit to the Calder Foundation in New York. In When Sandy Dreams, Varda melds footage of the sea and the mobile in motion with photographs she took in 1952 of Calder on the beach in the south of France. “I put these images together thinking of how the slight wind on the beach would move the mobile,” says Varda. In doing so, she bridges admiration for her old friend with her powerful connection to the ocean—a common motif in her visual art and the vessel through which she looked back on her life in the 2008 documentary The Beaches of Agnès.