The Jackleg Testament, Part One

Georgia Museum of Art's exhibition page [here]. Official (pdf) press release [here]. More, including multimedia, from semantikon.com [here]. Direct link to .mov [here] and [here].


The Athens Banner-Herald has video and music links for the exhibition. Sections from Julie Phillips's article -- "Storyteller has new twist on Genesis" -- in the ABH:

It took Jay Bolotin five years to rewrite Genesis. ...But really, in the ancient tradition of storytelling, that's not a terribly long time - especially given Bolotin's version went from sketches to woodcuts to music to an animated musical film that tells his version of the story. ...

Eve is lured from the Garden of Eden, in Bolotin's version, by a jack-in-the-box named, appropriately, Jack, and takes up with a Vaudeville-style review that's run by a god figure named Nobodaddy. Every few epochs, Nobodaddy produces a play called "The Theater of the Western Regions."...

Bolotin, who lives on a farm outside of Cincinnati, created the film from extensive digital photographs of his woodcuts and prints, manipulating them into a fascinating moving world by way of motion picture software.

A gifted musician and songwriter who's worked with Dan Fogelberg and whose praises have been sung by the likes of Kris Kristofferson and famed opera director Jonathan Eaton, Bolotin also created the musical score for the film and enlisted the vocal talents of opera singers Nigel Robson and Monte Jaffe, along with vocalist Karin Bergquist (of the band Over the Rhine).

The film, titled "The Jackleg Testament, Part One" along with an exhibition featuring all of the source work that went into the process of making the film, is on display at the Georgia Museum of Art. The exhibit has been on an extensive tour across the country, making its debut in May 2005 at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati.

It follows Bolotin's previous theatrical works, which have included an opera featuring large mechanical sculptures based on his woodcut-inspired creations. That project in particular took about 10 years. ...

Images: (left) Jay Bolotin, A Prehistory to that which is, by mistake, called The Fall of Man: Jack and Eve (The Beginning of Irony), 1999. Printed by Michelle Red Elk. 12 color woodcut prints, Edition of 20. Courtesy of the artist. (right) Jay Bolotin, Elements of a Woodcut Motion Picture Titled "The Jackleg Testament: part one - Jack & Eve" (Serpent Print), 2004-2005. Printed by Krista Gregory. Portfolio of 37 black and white woodcut prints with notations, Edition of 35. Courtesy of the artist.