A screenshot from Up/Rooted: Pamela Woolfords's Cabin Windows.
A first of its kind virtual-reality gallery show, Up/Rooted: Pamela Woolford's Cabin Windows is a unique retrospective presentation showcasing Pamela Woolford's narrative, performative, and film work experienced through rooms and windows of a virtual rustic, wooden cabin. Woolford is the writer, director, producer, and primary performer in the immersive-media experience.
Opens September 30, 2022
Joan Hisaoka Healing Arts Galery, 1632 U Street, NW, DC
Free. Reservations required.
Reservation information coming in September.
The Up/Rooted cabin home, set in the rural American south in the 1940s, contains rooms apropos of the time and rooms set in spaces inspired by Pamela Woolford's own family history, from 1960s Baltimore to present-day suburban Columbia, Maryland. In this way, she abstractly tells a three-generational story of The Great Migration, experimenting with the mixing of documentary art, fiction, and autobiography to explore history and the emotional range and inner lives of people who today carry the memories of that history.
Headshots of the 3D modeling-in-progress for Character B animations at ages 8, 40, and 85, inspired by Pamela Woolford's real-life mother Sadie Woolford, pictured below as a grade schooler, teenager, and in her 80s.
INCLUDED IN UP/ROOTED
The Up/Rooted VR experience features Pamela Woolford's films Generation and Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-Noir along with moments from her story "Just After Supper" and her upcoming memoirs Disrupt/ed (a mem-noir) and Eye Toned, Tooth Toned: An Account of Blackness, Memory, and My Mind. The Up/rooted gallery show will also premiere new narrative work by Pamela Woolford entitled Antoine and Me.
The Cabin Motif
Woolford derives her cabin windows motif from her films Interrupted: Prologue to a Mem-Noir and Generation and her story "Just After Supper." Interrupted had a limited online release in 2020 with a virtual premiere event attended by 1.5 thousand people. The event was cosponsored by Busboys and Poets and the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University. Interrupted was made possible in part with support from Maryland State Arts Council, United Way of Central Maryland, Mosaic Center for Culture and Diversity at University of Maryland Baltimore County, Leah Mazur and Drew Willard, and jazz-great Bob James. In 2018 and 2019, Generation was an official selection for a dozen arts and film festivals in three continents, won five film festival awards, and, like Interrupted, received rave reviews. "Just After Supper" is a fiction piece inspired by the life of Pamela's mother, writer and producer Sadie Woolford. The story was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by one of the Prize's contributing editors.
Generation film still by Denée Barr.
Frame from Interrupted. Cinematography by Daniel Grant.
Sadie Woolford in 1940s Arcola, NC.
Generation film still by Denée Barr.
PAMELA WOOLFORD on UP/ROOTED
for BLACK WOMEN'S CINEMA WEEK 2021
sponsored by CR8:BLK, Fractured Atlas, ¡Cinema Paradiso, and Film Fatales
CREDITS
Up/Rooted: Pamela Woolford's Cabin Windows VR Experience
Writer, Producer, Director, Voice Actor, Onscreen Performer......Pamela Woolford
Co-Producer......Sadie Woolford
3D Modeler, Animator......Dwayne Gayle
Game Developer......Eric Nevala
Design Consultant......Philip Mallory Jones
Sound Designer......Gregory Robinson
MUSIC: "The Future"
Composed and performed by John Phillip Richardson.
Lyrics written and performed by Paula Richardson.
Author, Model, Primary Voice Actor......Pamela Woolford
Sound Designer, Voice Actor......Gregory Robinson
Photographer......Antonio Moses
Handmade Book Artist and Printmaker......Sarah Matthews
Thank you John L. Butler Jr., Aimee Doyle, Renee Gittins, Nyala Kidaa, Leah Mazur, Satish More, and Maryland Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts.
Up/Rooted: Pamela Woolford's Cabin Windows is made possible in part with financial support from DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, Maryland State Arts Council, and The aSHE Fund. Antoine and Me is made possible in part with financial support from Maryland State Arts Council.
From the Baker Artist Award Special presented by PBS's Maryland Public Television
History of Up/Rooted
Originally, prior to becoming a virtual-reality experience, Up/Rooted: Pamela Woolford's Cabin Windows was conceived as a real-life cabin in the gallery space, where Pamela Woolford's art would be experienced through windows and augmented reality.
