Michael Robinson
Los Angeles, CA
Michael Robinson works in film, video and collage, exploring the joys and dangers of mediated experience. His work has shown internationally at a variety of venues including The 2012 Whitney Biennial, Int. Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMA P.S.1, The New York Film Festival, Whitechapel Gallery, REDCAT Los Angeles, Walker Art Center, The Austrian Film Museum, Berlinale, Toronto Int. Film Festival, and The MMCA Seoul. Michael has received support from The MacDowell Colony, Creative Capital, The Kazuko Trust, Wexner Center for the Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, and his films have received awards from numerous festivals. He was featured as one of the ”50 Best Filmmakers Under 50” by Cinema Scope magazine and his recent gallery shows have been reviewed in Art in America, Frieze, and Blouin Artinfo. Michael is represented by Carrie Secrist Gallery in Chicago, is distributed by Video Data Bank, and lives and works in Los Angeles. He is currently writing and developing his first feature-length film project, I’ll Be Thunder.
Circle in the Sand / I’ll Be Thunder
Michael Robinson works in film, video and collage, exploring the joys and dangers of mediated experience.
Artist BioCircle in the Sand and I’ll Be Thunder are two related, yet distinct experimental narrative films, exploring the transformative potential of exile, the communing of parallel dimensions, and the redemptive possibilities of apocalypse. Set in an unstable near future, Circle in the Sand (2012), follows a band of listless vagabonds and their supervising soldiers, wandering the ruins of a seaside military fort and reinterpreting the toxic remains of Western culture. Drawn with equal doses of humor and terror, I’ll Be Thunder is a feature-length psychodrama concerning a family running a secluded guest house on a remote tropical island over three days of mounting paranoia and paranormal shift. Despite their separate settings, characters and plots, the films share overlapping atmospheres and obsessions, both seeking hope within a culture of apathy and decay.