‘VISIONS OF HOPE: Moving Images’ invites ArtRage visitors to become artists
ArtRage’s “VISIONS OF HOPE: Moving Images” exhibit features the work of Teens with a Movie Camera. Through installations, the exhibit raises the question of whether filmmaking can be an accessible art form. Courtesy of Evan Bode
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At typical art galleries, visitors are not allowed to touch the art displays. But ArtRage’s new exhibit invites audiences to play, interact with the work and become artists themselves.
“Primarily within galleries and museums, you cannot touch things, but for this one, our visitors are able to make shadow puppets, make their own films and their own small little reels to see themselves as filmmakers,” ArtRage’s Co-Director Ellis Clay said.
ArtRage’s “VISIONS OF HOPE: Moving Images” opened earlier this month and is on display through March 21. The interactive multimedia exhibit features the work of Teens with a Movie Camera, a Syracuse-based community art project and filmmaking collective that connects local teens with industry professionals to make movies.
Upon entering the exhibit, visitors are met with an open white room, filled with television screens that play short films made by the organization’s members, a full-size tent, an umbrella with video clip projections and various interactive installations, like a shadow-puppet making station.
“It was a big effort to install, but it took a group of us working together, and I think that all the pieces on display are examples of creative collaboration,” said Evan Bode, co-founder of Teens with a Movie Camera and curator of the ArtRage exhibit. “We work together and build community while making art together, which is kind of the idea behind the program.”
A central part of Teens with a Movie Camera’s mission is to increase the accessibility of filmmaking and the exhibit aims to do the same.
The art uses simple materials, including paper shadow puppets and short films shot on cell phones. Everyone is able to express themselves through everyday tools, as simple as items on our kitchen table, said Bode.
“Students come in and see it is possible to make anything with small things that you have,” Shokoofeh Jabbari, a Syracuse University graduate student and the exhibit’s creative assistant, said.
After working with the exhibit’s teenage contributors this summer as a visiting artist, Jabbari said she saw the students’ hard work pay off now that the exhibit is open.
“You create and create and create and always collaborate,” said Jabbari.
Bode said this collaborative environment has been a mainstay of Teens with a Movie Camera since 2024, when Bode founded the organization with local artists Lida Suchy and Mišo Suchý, an SU professor of film and media arts. They founded the organization as a way to “reach beyond the university classroom and connect with the community,” Bode said.
Allowing the teenage artists to see themselves as artists coincides with ArtRage’s mission, Clay said. They aim to intersect culture and social justice issues through visual art.
“We’re giving agency to teenagers, who are the next generation of changemakers,” Clay said.
The exhibit showcases the creativity of Teens with a Movie Camera members, Bode said. They play with light and shadow to tell their own stories, even nontraditional ones.
“Things that seem impossible, through hard work in the direction of a dream, become possible over time,” Bode said. “That’s in the stories we have in this exhibition, such as a chicken who dreamed of flying to the moon.”
