About

My name is Coleman Stewart, I'm an artist primarily working in film and music.

When I’m working, questions begin my process and guide how I want an audience to reflect. How do we communicate with the world around us and how do these relationships form things in that world? What’s the difference between your boyfriend and a desk lamp? At what point and under what circumstances do they become the same? Why is there mountain people and beach people? What do mushrooms think about litter? Is it as hostile as we perceive? Are bee pollen and plastic in the ocean similar in any way? Why don’t they spill something nice on the environment? What would that look like, and what if nature has a different idea of what’s nice? How then is that idea reflected in your neighbors romantic relationship? When do relationships end?

How do we know when someone is gone?

These kinds of questions drive the piece I’m working on and give the subjects their animistic charge.

My work focuses on using film to express ambient feelings of communication between objects, people, and places. I refer to it as articulating telepathy within an ecosystem, in the way that we say your foot talks to your brain when you stub your toe—I think it’s fun to extend that notion out to a place where virtually all nouns are talking to each other and by using the cinematic tools of composition, montage, sights and sounds, I’m able to hold a language-less conversation between these objects. These conversations are somewhat abstract, but all begin with me wanting to express a unique feeling, whether that’s the feeling of grief getting lighter or those weird first steps from tongue tied conversation into full blown flirting. At the core of these abstractions are these real emotional experiences that, when told in soft, slow paced, meditative films, offer a wiser reflection on that experience by alluding to all the experiences within them.

The objects I use are primarily informed by my present environment and interests. I’ve been lucky enough to have lived in many places across the world, particularly in small rural towns where the people and the objects they care for take on a much greater significance. I am drawn to these confined places where the attention and care to each noun, no matter how menial or small, is recognized as vital to the health of the big picture. I find these rural places and their inhabitants always have much to teach me, and I love harnessing whatever I may glean—transmuting it into material, taking a place like southern Ohio and bringing the spirit of its subjects to a place like Iceland. Having the people, places, things of these environments become starlets in a movie brings me great joy, and I love giving this work to these communities that give so much to me. I have been lucky enough to exhibit work in these places like Denver, Iceland, England, Denmark, Switzerland, and the Internet, and look forward to bringing these objects, conversations, and places into the future.