We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Amanda Besl a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Amanda, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Do you think your parents have had a meaningful impact on you and your journey?
My parents are artists and were art teachers in the rural town I grew up in. They gave me a lot of space to explore the natural world. We lived on the edge of town and had a really big backyard with raspberries and pear trees and it felt like acreage to a child. My parents were poster children for the DIY movement and my father built a greenhouse onto the side of our house. It was a personal Narnia entered through a door off the kitchen and down a flight of wooden stairs into the basement that opened to a space that was bright and humid and full of my father’s Cattleya orchids, overgrown houseplants and tomato plants. To this day the environment of a greenhouse is a balm to me. Finishing high school, I was the only one of my friends whose parents sat them down to write down all the things they loved to do, and then choose a major based on that. My parents are my biggest supporters but never in a domineering way. They just held space for me. Last July my mother helped me to make my short film Incantations. To film my mother’s hands, we took turns holding each other. I filmed her and she filmed me while we sat on mossy stones as generations of the crows my parents have fed for years circled overhead. I hadn’t understood how intimate this project would be, hadn’t prepared for the wrenching moment when my mother realized that her fingers don’t always do what she wants them to. She made that space for me even when she didn’t think she could and was my voice actress because she knew I needed her.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I am a visual artist and an experimental filmmaker living in Buffalo, NY with my husband, various animals including a very large rabbit and many, many houseplants. The majority of my painting practice is botanically focused. I use natural history as a platform to explore social issues and I approach my work from an ecofeminist and often an ecogothic lens. I was recently awarded a 2024 NYSCA grant to fund my project “Temple of Hortus”, an art installation of botanically inspired paintings, sculptures and video experienced through an interactive environment. This work explores and questions the contemporary consumerism and curation of nature through hybridization, mutation and collection.
For ten years I was a high school art teacher at a private school. I was only vaguely aware that one could make a video with a cellphone when Covid hit and overnight I was required to teach high school art asynchronously. My first film was born from this experience, beginning as a video prompt for a class that I just kept working on. I also taught myself a program that allows you to create soundtracks out of loops and I upgraded from the editing software that came on my PC to teaching myself Premiere Pro. My first film, Transit of Venus was part of my exhibition “Blue Mythologies” at The Raft of Sanity Gallery two years ago. Now I am actively submitting to film festivals. I have made five additional short films which have screened here in New York state, as well as in West Virginia, Cleveland and in Toronto. It’s been an incredibly rewarding experience and the fact that I wasn’t trained as a filmmaker has been an asset for the path I took. Experimental films allow me to explore nonlinear ways of storytelling. It’s like I’m painting, but with film. It was also really empowering because I had a vision and the fact that I was self-taught gave me carte blanche to just try things and not worry if I was doing it “the wrong way” from a more traditional film standpoint. This has led me to creating cyanotype-based and plant-based stop motion, using plants as puppets, superimposing imagery and sharing stories that I never thought I would be sharing. It’s been empowering and moving from painting to film has also caused me to push my painting practice in unexpected ways.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
Besides an inherent need to never stop making things, I would say that a passion for the natural world and discovering the incredible diversity within it is a driving force for me. I am both attracted and repelled to this human-centric notion of curating the world, especially as this relates to plants. I am working on a body of drawings right now that are inspired by a bioluminescent petunia that was released this year. I also have a series of drawings of hoya plant cuttings presented in a grid to suggest the trading in plant parts on an online platform such as Etsy. The unusual corkscrewing shape of the leaves that is iconic to this variety was enhanced by plant breeders in the 1950s with the use of x-rays. When seen isolated from the rest of the plant and drawn in warm tones, the forms suggest human anatomy and the fluorescent pink surrounding them exoticizes the notion of flesh. Suggesting the evolution that occurs in Jeff VanderMeer’s novels, we may forget that these are parts of plants and not parts of us. There are also parallels between the ways nature and women have been treated over time and that drives me as well.
I made a film called An Illustrated Guide to Flowering Houseplants. It began as a reaction to the questionable and frustrating advice to “Bloom where you are planted” and follows both a woman and a Venus Flytrap, one of which blooms by the end of the film. In truth, an unhappy plant is just as likely to die as it is to flower when trapped in an inappropriate environment. I was interested in applying ideas of ecofeminism to an indoor garden to suggest an outgrown intimate relationship. The aesthetic reflects that of a vintage gardening show from the early 1970s evoking ideas of outdated instruction subverted by personal experience. I was inspired by filmmaker Maya Deren and her disorienting 1943 film, Meshes of the Afternoon. My facial features, which appear and disappear in the paisley bathroom curtain, are a nod to Surrealist film.
I believe that the more we are exposed to and challenged by other ways of being on our planet, whether through other cultures or other species, the fuller our own life experience will be. My garden and studio are laboratories. My paintings and short films are ecogothic; referencing a changing landscape and the haunting refrain of better living through chemistry that is revealed to be questionable again and again in our hindsight.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
Making art gives me the excuse to go down intellectual rabbit holes and also acquire the most wonderfully bizarre skillsets in a way that is really organic and feels very honest. Especially as an experimental filmmaker, I can share what things look like in my head, and also what they sound and feel like. By its very nature, experimental film rejects orthodoxy. My film work involves a lot of layering and multiple exposures, so making a film for me is like having 8 paintings all stacked on top of each other but seeing them all at once.
It’s exciting to let the work determine your path. I’m creating a video installation for an extensive botanical project for my NYSCA grant. I needed to purchase a ghillie suit so that my limbs could be roots emerging from a seed. A month ago, I learned how to handle a snake for my short film Serpentine which was inspired by the true story of a pet snake who was rescued after being hurled from a moving car. I’d never touched one before, but it was exciting to try to convey a non-human experience within a manmade space. They don’t see the way we do. Snakes see with scent and taste and temperature, and it was so cool to learn about them and tell this ecofeminist story in a way that would foster empathy for a creature that folks tend to have feelings about. I’m also teaching myself to play the theremin to add to my soundtracks. Since I started making films, all these side obsessions are happening and it feels right to be always learning new things and just seeing where the work takes you!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.amandabesl.com/
- Instagram: amandabesl
Image Credits
courtesy of the artist