[A] postcard-sized [film that]…manage[s] to implicate the audience’s ethical imagination…Distant Shores models a necessary imaginative leap simply by juxtaposing footage of a Chicago River cruise with testimony of a migrant’s harrowing voyage at sea. A three-minute film edited in camera; it nevertheless offers several ways of thinking about displacement.
–– Max Goldberg, KQED Arts
Christopher Harris makes films and installations that read African American historiography through the poetics and aesthetics of experimental cinema. He employs a variety of technical and formal approaches in his work including manually and photo-chemically altered appropriated moving images, staged re-enactments of archival artifacts, interrogations of documentary conventions, hand-cranked cameras, rear-projection, optical printing, and hand processing with high-contrast black-and-white film stock, solarization, shots of extreme duration, and screen captured video. His influences and inspirations, which vary from film to film, range from Black literature, all forms of Black music and various strains of mid-century avant-garde film.
His films have appeared widely at festivals, museums and cinematheques, including an upcoming solo screening at the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Previous solo screenings include the the Museum of Modern Art, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the Locarno Film Festival, and Arsenal Berlin, a two-person screening with Su Friedrich at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris and group screenings at the New York Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others. He was also a featured artist at the 2018 Flaherty Film Seminar. His honors include a 2023 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for Film/Video, the 2022 Ground Glass Award from Prismatic Ground for outstanding contribution in the field of experimental media, a Creative Capital Award, the Los Angeles Filmforum Artist Project Grant, a Wexner Center for the Arts Artist Residency Award. His fellowships include the Mellon Collaborative Fellowship for Arts Practice and Scholarship, Radcliffe, Chrysalis, and Alpert/MacDowell. Writing about his work and interviews with Harris have appeared in Art in America, Film Comment, BOMB Magazine and Film Quarterly as well as numerous books and journals. Harris is based in Iowa where he is the F. Wendell Miller Associate Professor of Film and Video Production in the Department of Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa.