Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Film, Video, Installation
Michael Damm is an artist and filmmaker based in San Francisco, California, who has worked across experimental film, single-channel video and site-specific projection installation since the mid-1990s. He earned an MFA from Mills College in Oakland, and began exhibiting in the Bay Area with early showings at Southern Exposure (1994) and The Lab (1996) in San Francisco. Over the following decades his work travelled well beyond the region, appearing at Plus Kunst in Düsseldorf (2002), the BBC Big Screen in Manchester (2005), Belkin Satellite in Vancouver (2007) and the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College in Portland (2008), alongside Bay Area presentations at Catharine Clark Gallery and David Cunningham Projects.
From October 2012 to January 2013 Damm was an artist in residence in Recology San Francisco’s Art at the Dump program, working out of the studio at the company’s Tunnel Avenue transfer station and building new work from scavenged material. The residency produced Incidental Films for an Accidental Audience: On Tunnel, a rear-projection video installation staged in the windows of the studio for passing commuters, as well as a piece assembled from a discarded collection of 1980s photographic slides layered over one another until their documentary content dissolved. He reprised a version of the installation in 2016 as a three-channel work in the street-facing windows of SF Camerawork, shown dusk to dawn as part of that gallery’s photography and video retrospective of the Recology program, and returned to the material again in 2024 for The Dump Show at Hosfelt Gallery.
Damm’s more recent films are drawn from a long-running project on the San Lorenzo Creek watershed in the hills east of San Francisco Bay, a cycle of six short films inspired by trail-camera footage and citizen science. San Lorenzo Creek premiered in San Francisco Cinematheque’s CROSSROADS festival in 2023, and Crow Canyon had its world premiere at CROSSROADS the following year.
Damm’s practice mines the perceptual and material properties of cinema itself — light and shadow, transience, flicker, incessant motion — as a way of letting images slip loose from their documentary footing and register instead as experiences in their own right. He has described the aim as activating a process of re-perception, etching an after-image on the mind’s eye that persists afterward as a lens through which to re-see the world. The installations pursue this outside the theatre: rear-projected into windows and doorways along transit corridors at night, they address an audience that has not chosen to be one, interrupting the walk home with a few seconds of unexplained image.
The watershed films work in a quieter register but from the same premise. Silent and without text, they observe the urban/wildland interface in the suburbs east of the Bay — synanthropic animals at home in built space, native and introduced trees and insects tangled together, the incidental movement of light and water — and let meaning accumulate purely through the interplay of shots, cuts and the illuminated screen. They are nature films that are equally city films, attentive to the way colonization and urbanization have shaped what now reads as the natural world, and to the observation that the urban/wildland interface can be anywhere a pigeon makes a nest.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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