INA DIANE ARCHER

May 31, 2007 at 6:53 PM
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INA DIANE ARCHER

Director and visual artist Ina Diane Archer lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. An adjunct professor in Core Studies at The New School/Parsons School of Design, she received her BFA in Film/Video from Rhode Island School of Design, a Certificate in Film Production from NYU-SCE, and her MA in Cinema Studies from NYU’s Graduate School of Arts and Science. Her videos, multimedia works and collages have been shown nationally in museums, galleries and film festivals including The Studio Museum in Harlem, MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, Dam Stuhltrager Gallery-Brooklyn, and the New York Expo of Short Films. Ina has won a number of grants and residencies for her artwork including a 2005 Creative Capital grant. In 2005 her installation work Hattie McDaniel: or A Credit to the Motion Picture Industry, was featured in Currents: African American Video Art Today at the Cheekwood Museum of Art in Nashville, TN along with artists Jonathan Calm, Rodney McMillian, Jefferson Pinder, Rudy Shepherd, and Gary Simmons.

Name: Ina Diane Archer
Profession: Artist, Filmmaker
City of Birth: Paris, France
Tell us about your current project:
The Lincoln Film Conspiracy (LFC) is a short film and multi-screen installation that combines archival film footage, video segments, and digital image manipulation. It’s the story of a preservationist’s search for a vanished archive of technologically progressive black films previously abducted by aliens. The stolen Lincoln films constitute, for the universe, the anthropological data representing planet Earth. The Lincoln Film Conspiracy is set in the present, reflects on the past, and imagines a visionary future. The film humorously confronts the practice of film preservation and archiving, particularly of work by minority and regional artists. The film will be in a serialized form reflecting my interest in archaic formats.
What is your current obsession?
My garden and the project above and, as always, movies.
Where do you find your inspiration?
In the cinema, in music and sound, history—trolling around modern pop culture.
What’s the one thing that everyone must know about you?
I’m not unavailable.
Who do you love?
I LOVE. I think…it’s hard to name just one thing or person.
What was your biggest fork in the road?
When my mother was dying; I had to decide whether to live or die emotionally.
What was your biggest break?
Probably, getting into the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program.
What’s your favorite libation?
I LOVE MARTINIS and champagne—but not together!
What do you do everyday without fail?
Worry and hope.
Are you addicted to anything? Anyone?
Movies, cable television, Richard Widmark, and internal dialogue. Looking. The Past.
Do you recycle? And if so, what?
In my collage work and in my videos I recycle images. I try to remain diligent about paper and plastic. In a condo, my dream of a composting is probably not going to come true.
What are you reading right now?
Trashy Fassbinder bio, Obama’s first bio, SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film by Robert A. Beuka.
What’s your favorite website?
WFMU’s Beware of the Blog, The UbuWeb 365 Days Project—it’s amazing! It goes on the obsession list.
Surrealism or op art?
Surrealism—but I’d love an op art wallpaper
Mondrian or Man Ray?
Mondrian! I LOVE MONDRIAN!
Who are you currently channeling?
The Golden Girls, Ernst Lubitsch, Ernie Kovacs.
PVC or canvas?
zeros and ones (Note: the digital realm)
Pharmaceutical of choice?
Martinis. Hellzapoppin’ (1941 with Olsen and Johnson)—it should go with the surrealism question.
Fresh squeezed or concentrate?
Depends on whether it’s juice or ideas.
Platforms, stilettos, or wedges?
I’m not allowed to wear them now because I wore them in the 70s but I’m craving a pair of those Water Buffalos
(aka Kork-Ease platforms).
New talent of choice?
African films and filmmakers like Teddy Mattera (Max and Mona, SA 2007). Or do you mean a talent new to me?
That would be gardening—I used to have a black thumb.

Ina Archer’s The Lincoln Film Conspiracy will screen this Fall at the PICA TBA Festival (Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s Time-Based Art Festival). The installation will feature manufactured artifacts: props, lobby cards, posters, and products that represent the remaining material proof of the vanished Lincoln films. The installation setting will be an extraterrestrial ethnographic museum or archive. The themes of Ina’s LFC project include the complex historical relationship of marginalized people to cinema and media representations. Additionally, the project speculates about how culture and technology might have been depleted by the loss of an accessible and coherent black cinema.