tempted still 2014
Arteles Creative Center, Haukijärvi, Finland
Short Film (5:07 min.color, sound)
After Amy Johnson produced The Matanuska Project in 2011, she went to an art residency in rural Finland as a way to continue working in the Circumpolar North. With nothing but her camera and two months alone, it turned out to be the ideal setting for her to fully sink into another isolated and unfamiliar landscape and create this short film, Tempted Still. She recalls the severe cold, yet lack of snow, and never feeling so lonely. Her character’s costume evolved from found birch branches and wheat from the surrounding woods and fields. And for Johnson, the apples, which were both tempting and rotten, represented everything from harvest and abundance to food shortage and original sin. The film’s title “Tempted Still” makes reference to the apple as a symbol of temptation and/or poison and the unforeseen consequences of indulging. Fast forward nine years, this film, with its quintessentially autumn spirit, naturally became the Fall component of Seasons Quartet representing this epoch of abundance in which humankind, bursting with both brains and beauty, is pushing the earth to the brink.
“Once upon a time, there was an artist, and she loved the earth, and the earth loved her, and she wove a crown of sticks, a skirt of sticks and wheat, put her bare feet in red skis, and traveled on moss, through woods, aspen leaves quaking, into a lake, turning, spinning in that water, the surface doubling her, doubling sky and cloud, and then she gathered dead grasses and dried flowers, gathered apples, bruised and rotting, asking what might be harvested, asking what might be saved.”