06/12/2026
This Filmmaker-Member Friday, we’ve decided to highlight the work of member Josh Guilford. Josh is a filmmaker, researcher, and teacher at Amherst college who has several landscape works in our collection. Two of the three films he has in our collection deal with locales on Lake Superior. The film depicted above, CIRCUMAMBULATIONS (2018), which Guilford created with Andrew Ranville, is a dual projection film built from two 16mm camera rolls that “loop and interface, dialogue and diverge”
The rolls were shot on Rabbit Island, a remote 91-acre wilderness located in Lake Superior, which is the largest freshwater lake in the world. Mapping the circumference of the island (9,504 ft.) to the length of a standard camera roll (4000 frames), the filmmakers walked the island’s coast in opposite directions on subsequent days, exposing a single frame of film roughly every 2.376 feet. When projected side-by-side, the resulting films combine to form an alternative representation of the island, collapsing its dense interior and evoking a shifting land mass defined by a constantly fluctuating border of water and stone. An original score by Roarke Menzies accompanies the projection, included as a digital file. Working entirely with field recordings taken on the island, Menzies looped, overlaid, and played back selections of the recordings at different speeds, altering and re-recording these selections in his studio to poetically retrace the filmmakers’ steps through time, equipment, and multiple material transfers.
Go check out CIRCUMAMBULATIONS and more on Josh’s works on our website today!
