Excerpt from The Illinois Parables by Deborah Stratman
The Illinois Parables
Artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman makes work that investigates power, control and belief, exploring how places, ideas, and society are intertwined.
Artist BioThe Illinois Parables is an experimental documentary combining a series of regional narratives questioning the roles that doubt and mysticism play in social ideology. Mythic histories of violence, atomic breakthrough, utopias and vigilante justice comprise a suite of Midwestern parables. This film gathers sites and events that evoke the spiritual vis-à-vis the political. The locations under investigation are those where the boundaries between the rational world and the supernatural becomes tenuous. Throughout the film, trajectories of faith and technology intermingle, suggesting linkages between scientific and religious abstraction.
Deborah Stratman
Chicago, IL
Artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman makes work that investigates power, control and belief, exploring how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. Her themes range widely, as do the mediums she questions them with. Recent projects have addressed listening, freedom, surveillance, sinkholes, comets, raptors, orthoptera, levitation, exodus, sisterhood and faith. She has exhibited internationally at venues including MoMA, Centre Pompidou, Hammer Museum, Mercer Union, Witte de With, Tabakalera, Whitney Biennial and festivals including Sundance, Viennale, Berlinale, CPH/DOX, TIFF, Oberhausen, True/False and Rotterdam. She lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois.