Pictures in Motion: Films & Videos by Agnès Varda, Lucy Raven, Rosa Barba, and Ephraim Asili

Thursday, May 7–Sunday, May 31
Screened all day during open hours
Free with admission

From May 7 through 31, we present four films and videos by Agnès Varda, Lucy Raven, Rosa Barba, and Ephraim Asili, which were commissioned in 2017 by the Calder Foundation, New York, and originally curated by Vic Brooks. Extending Alexander Calder’s longstanding dialogue with moving image—evident in his collaborations with filmmakers such as Herbert Matter and Hans Richter—these works take up the artist’s inquiry into form, movement, and time. Produced in response to Calder’s practice, they articulate a shared interest in duration and transformation, activating the moving image field as a site of relation and perceptual encounter.

When Sandy Dreams, 2017
Directed by Agnès Varda
Color, sound; 1:53 min.
© Estate of Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda chose to focus on the hanging mobile Vertical Foliage (1941), which she came across during a visit to the Calder Foundation in New York. In When Sandy Dreams, Varda melds footage of the sea and the mobile in motion with photographs she took in 1952 of Calder on the beach in the South of France. “I put these images together thinking of how the slight wind on the beach would move the mobile,” says Varda. In doing so, she bridges admiration for her old friend with her powerful connection to the ocean—a common motif in her visual art and the vessel through which she looked back on her life in the 2008 documentary The Beaches of Agnès.

Shape Notes, 2017
Directed by Lucy Raven; performance by Talujon Percussion Quartet
Color, sound; 3:22 min.

Lucy Raven chose to focus on Calder’s sound-making standing mobile Chef d’orchestre (1964), which was commissioned by Diego Masson and composer Earle Brown to act as both an instrument and a conductor in Brown’s Calder Piece (1963–66). “He was mesmerized [by Calder’s mobiles] because all of their forms move both independently and in conjunction with each other, which is how [Brown] wanted his compositions,” says Raven. In Shape Notes, she animates a series of still images taken during a 2016 performance of Calder Piece at Friends Seminary in New York. Used throughout Raven’s practice, this technique magnetically reimagines the open-form composer’s fusion of percussion and sculpture.

Enigmatic Whisper, 2017
Directed by Rosa Barba; original music by Jan St. Werner, John Colpitts, and Andrew Barker
16mm film, color, optical sound; 8 min.
Image © Rosa Barba

Rosa Barba chose to focus on the hanging mobile Untitled (c. 1968), a light-reflecting work whose unpainted elements emanate radiant energy. With few exceptions, the sculpture has hung in Calder’s Roxbury studio since it was made more than 50 years ago. It captured Barba’s attention when she first visited the space: “I like that it doesn’t have a title and is a kind of observer of the production place,” says Barba. “It was really amazing to see the studio and how everything is left untouched. This idea came to activate and bring back the working relationship with all the objects inside.” Enigmatic Whisper became a portrait of the entire studio, with Barba bringing life back into the space by way of her camera and by setting the mobile and other sculptures in motion.

Calder for Peter, 2017
Directed by Ephraim Asili
16mm HD transfer, color, sound; 11:18 min.

Ephraim Asili chose to focus on Five Swords (1976), a monumental stabile that has been part of the bucolic Storm King Art Center landscape in New York since 1988. Asili lives nearby and contemplated the sculpture as an element of his own environment in Calder for Peter. “My films almost never focus on these beautiful landscapes; it’s something that I try to avoid because it feels too easy, living where I do,” says Asili. “On the other hand, I’ve always wanted to make work like that. This felt like the perfect opportunity to indulge that.” In doing so, he used the lens of filmmaker Peter Hutton, for whom the film was named and whose own work often references the Hudson River School of painting and considers that particular landscape. Asili’s film is primarily shot in the sculpture’s immediate vicinity but also considers its larger surroundings, from fog consuming the Hudson River to a Metro-North train trudging northward through the snow.

All films produced and commissioned by the Calder Foundation, New York, in collaboration with Vic Brooks. All artworks by Alexander Calder © 2026 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Pictures in Motion is a series that presents moving-image works, including experimental cinema, artist films, and documentaries. Each program is organized around themes that reflect Calder Gardens’ curatorial focus, showing how artists use motion, time, and sound to expand contemporary visual practice.

Programming at Calder Gardens is generously supported by Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz, Donna Green, and Michael Sternberg.