Tara Merenda Nelson is an artist, programmer and curator living in Rochester NY.  She is currently the Curator of Moving Image Collections at Visual Studies Workshop.

Description of screening:

Since leaving Boston in 2014, I haven't made many films, though I have continued to shoot 16mm and Super 8. These days I shoot just for myself, and often don't watch what I have shot for several months, if at all.  Many films are still waiting to be processed. I'm not sure why I stopped. I don't know what happened.

Recently I looked back on the last few films I composed on Super 8, between 2012 and 2014, as a way to better understand where I was emotionally before I stopped making films to share with an audience. What I found was a body of work made in tribute to Anne Charlotte Robertson, who died in 2012. I didn't know Anne well but her work was a powerful influence on me, and when she died I felt a responsibility to respond to her films through my own. The films I made are failures for the most part, but not many people would know that because outside of Boston fewer and fewer people have seen her work. It's hard to explain my failures to an audience that doesn't understand what I'm measuring myself against. So this screening is a great opportunity for me to share my shortcomings with a community that understands where I'm coming from, and to take communal comfort in the fact that Anne's work lives on through our own, for better or for worse.All films shown on Super 8Titles include:
Flying Fish (2012)
Super 8
A portrait of my pregnant sister

A Field At Dawn (2013) 
Super 8
Documents the beauty of a difficult year.
Shot in Ithaca, NY, 2012-2013

Last Day of Capricorn (2013)
A self portrait on my 38th birthday, which I spent alone in a strangers' apartment.  Memories mixed with important messages and were sent through the pictures on the walls.  Dedicated to Anne Charlotte Robertson.