Medium

This film originated as an expanded portrait of artist Carol Bove as she created four monumental sculptures commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One week after filming began, New York City went into its first pandemic lockdown. Filmed against the backdrop of the progressing pandemic, Medium evolved into a meditation on materiality and the artist as a medium through which ideas move into the world. We see Bove work with steel as if it’s as malleable as clay, wrestling with illusionism, scope and scale to materialize sculptures that appear at once massive and weightless in the niches of the Met’s façade. Robert Stillman’s music is the propulsive soundtrack to the parallel narratives of a strong spirit of perseverance, a kind of triumph of expression in the face of literalism, and wonder over didacticism. Filming began in February of 2020 and the works were installed in February of 2021. In the interim the whole world changed.