What began as a film experiment with shadow and light soon evolved into an abstract horror movie shot almost entirely in miniature using cardboard, paper and clay. Focusing on suspense, mood and tone, our young patients veer away from the graphic nature of the modern horror genre, and focus more on the anticipation of the event and what our imagination supplies to a scene.

Utilizing techniques such as lighting, green screen, stop-motion animation and soundscapes the patients create a world that exists somewhere between the Mr. Bill comedy shorts of the late 1970s/early 1980s and David Lynch’s conceptual horror film, Eraserhead.

For this world, patients of all ages built clay figures and cardboard sets; plotted scenes and created characters; recorded sound effects, vocalizations, and music; filmed and edited.

As the creation of the film proceeded, we noticed that the prominent themes—time, television and fear of the unknown—that envelop the psyche of our character as he explores a mysterious house that lies at the bottom of a well, could very well pertain to a young patient’s experience in the hospital.

‘The Lost House,’ created student by student over the course of 10 months, encapsulates several matters that patients encounter during their hospital stay—as the gaps between medical procedures are filled in by television shows, clock watching and the disorientation of being somewhere unfamiliar and sometimes horrifying.

Mikey Peterson
Filmmaker-in-Residence
John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital

A circus is a show of the imagination. It is a showcase of the impossible — an improbably large environment put up in a remarkably short time, where people and amazing animals from around the world perform impressive physical and mental feats. The circus is music, laughter, lights and smells.

You can find every species of thrill under the big top, thrills that come from the peculiar mixture of astonishment, amusement, and fright that rushes over us when faced with the unknown and with the almost over-whelming display and cacophony of a circus. A hospital can be such a place, too; a sometimes circus-like place that is what one of our young poets calls “a hellish heaven.”

Most often, however, there is no excitement, of either the positive or negative kind — there is mostly a purgatory-like tedium. In the midst of the high-wire act between procedures and the hours of lying in bed that being in a hospital imposes on each child and young adult, the artists of Snow City Arts attempt to provide another ring, of sorts, within which the students can perform feats of imagination and artistry.

As you sightsee under our big-top, imagine each child and young adult acting as carnival barker in front of these paintings, collages, illustrations, films, poems, and songs, each calling out to you to see and hear their “Amazing Feats of Artistic Daring-Do.” “Look at the amazing Mr. Microphone!” yells one; “Dance, come and dance to my pirate song!” commands another; “Watch pen and paper perform in the incredible world of moving pictures!” entreats one more. There is a thrill at every turn…

Underneath this action movie’s exterior of smoke, chases, and fire lie the foundation of mythology, the conflict of good versus evil, and the technical prowess of editing the fast-paced film sequence. The students’ knowledge of heroes and villains led directly to the main characters, including the film’s hero, Double Cobra, and his arch nemesis, Mongoose.

The kids explored the anatomy of the edited sequences by remaking iconic scenes from Mad Max, The Hunter and Live Free Or Die Hard, as well as nodding to The Transporter, Vanishing Point, Transformers and Shaft. They utilized techniques such as live-action, model building, stop-motion animation, green-screen, and soundtrack composition, ultimately creating action in the idle hospital environment.

Due to the students’ temporary stays in our pediatrics ward, a consistent visual costume was developed (mustache and gold medallion) so that several actors could play our hero. As the kids developed original narratives to connect the sequences we realized that their imaginations were far too big for the hospital’s space. So we interwove these brainstorm sessions within the film, sharing the artistic process and the students’ infinite imaginations.

Mikey Peterson
Filmmaker-in-Residence
John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital

The title of our gallery night comes from one metaphor among many that appear in a poem by eight-year-old Carolina, titled “Random Parts.” Other metaphors include “The sun is a rectangle,” “The sky is a soft pillow,” and “The Earth is a sandwich.” Carolina was asked to pair objects from outside her room with ones inside her room and in those instants, she created a new space, a moon-box, a space where she was a poet and not a patient. In fact, the very word “metaphor” comes from the Greek word meaning to “transfer” or “carry cross.” (You can see “metaphor” spelled out in stenciled letters on the side of Greek moving trucks!)

The art that you will see, hear, and experience here comes from similar metaphoric transformations, as students transfer themselves from one place to another: hospital rooms become ateliers, and film, photography and recording studios; bed trays turn into palettes, easels, writing desks, and drafting tables. Each occasion, each meeting—through art— between an artist-in-residence and an artist/patient is novel: the whole artistic process begins again with each new encounter, from idea to process to finished piece. Whether  the moment lasts 20 minutes or three hours, art has changed the moment, as well as the patient and teaching artist themselves, within and without.

As artists, we cannot underestimate the sense of relevance as artists we gain from our work with these incredibly talented children and young adults. Our hope is that art begins to gain relevance for the children outside of the hospital, and that they begin to transform new spaces through their art. Let that be here, in this gallery—let the art make you forget the circumstances of the artist, and experience only a painting by a young painter, a poem by a young poet, a song by a young musician. Just as we have literally moved the art from the hospitals to this gallery, move the patient here, too, and imagine him or her standing next to their creation, a proud artist.

I am a sky child
I come with some large rays of sun
and brighten your day.  I rise and set
you in Hawaii. I warm your water;
you swim like playful dolphins.

I am a sky child
Born with a bunch of snowflakes,
I give you goosebumps when I touch you
with my cold hands. You feel like you’re
in the North Pole with the Polar bears.

I am a sky child
Drip drip I’m in the rain forest.
You feel the drops coming down.
You cover your face and hide from danger
like a chimpanzee hides from humans.

I am a sky child
I turn your night purple, light blue, and navy.
With glowing stars and a large moon,
you curl up like a cat and relax
visualize me as you fall to sleep.

Laura decided to write a poem about a person who acted moodily, like the sky, and like her. She also wanted to use a refrain similar to Dawes’ refrain “I am a tornado child.”  Laura listed characteristics of the sky in all its “moods,” then organized the details of her poem into lines and stanzas. She gave herself an added constraint of mentioning an animal in each stanza.

Laura’s poem made its way to Bernie, a Rush Hospital artist-in-residence, to be adapted into a short animated piece. His students acted as film production team members, handling duties of direction, storyboarding, performing, and some editing. The effects achieved in this animation were a product of combining drawings, paintings, and shadow puppets on an over-head projector. It embraces the lo-tech fun of a tool that may be on its way out of modern life, and is a celebration of the collaborative spirit between people that have never met, over a great period of time.

Erin Teegarden
Poet-in-Residence
Children’s Memorial Hospital

The process of creating the script began with the above question, and under my watchful eye, sparked this 27-minute movie. Each patient decided what would happen next, based on a storyline created earlier by fellow patients.

The first collaborator, Alondra C., age 11, decided the story should begin with ”a cheerleader that loses her pompoms and hires a private detective to find them.” Subsequent patients added more characters and subplots.

These interactions between patients occurred via a wide variety of media with the help of Snow City artists Sarah Bendix and Lara Golan. In many ways, we resident artists were messengers as much as teachers, carrying the plot thread of “The Mystery Movie” from patient to patient.

Using toy theater techniques expert Tracy Otwell from Redmoon Theater shared with us, Sarah Bendix and I worked one-on-one with patients to develop detailed characters, props and sets.

As you would imagine, most patients do not want their “hospital self” to be projected to the world.  Through miniature toy theater, patients could freely express themselves with their ideas, acting, art making, and music without self-conscious restraints.

For many, the filmmaking process is something of a mystery of its own. That said, it is inherently cross-disciplined, and so this project was rich with ways for children to explore screenwriting, music composition, sound effects, set and character design, voice-over acting, puppetry, and video recording. Together, they solved it.

Mary Scherer
Filmmaker-in-Residence
Children’s Memorial Hospital

What bright thread continues to run through me?
– Sandra, age 15, Children’s Memorial Hospital

Threads run through our lives, in our clothes, our minds, our metaphors. Our thoughts have threads, and we often try to find or to follow the thread of a story or even the thread of another’s mind.

We hang by a thread.

The Greek Fates allot each of us a certain length of life’s thread.

There are threads we try to piece back together when something comes apart; and those we try to follow when we think about where we’ve been, and where we’re going.

As artists working in a hospital setting, we typically meet two kinds of patients: those for whom the hospital is a thread that runs through their entire lives, and those for whom a hospital stay is only a short interruption of their usual thread: home, school, friends, family.

As artists, we witness all of our patients cull moments together with paint brushes, pens, keyboards, cameras, clay, and words. These moments are always inspired by other art — some by well-known artists like Piet Mondrian — some lesser known like Sandra, whose poem above inspired our 2010 gallery exhibit as a whole.

These collaborations, between our young artists and “great” artists, and between the young students themselves, are the nearly invisible stitches and seams that fabricate this exhibit.

Take a moment to view the photos from our 2010 Gallery Night Exhibition — What Bright Thread — and you will see for yourself how these young hospitalized children spin ideas that at moments are so preciously and austerely woven, that they leave us undone.

What meaning can be made from the objects of our daily lives?

How do these objects over time begin to inform our personal experiences of nostalgia, beauty, and fantasy — and how do they in the end become the tokens of our memories? How do these simple trinkets of past eras so powerfully connect us to the people whose lives they once filled?

These are some of the questions that 20th century American artist Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) probed in his vibrant body of work. A pioneer of assemblage who had no formal training in art, Cornell made a name for himself constructing one-of-a-kind “boxes” that framed unusual arrangements of found objects.

Fascinated by fragments of once-beautiful things, Cornell pulled from his surrealist leanings to construct his provocative and surprising compositions. More interactive than two-dimensional paintings, Cornell’s boxes seem to invite us into the artist’s miniature and personal vignettes.

Like Cornell’s miniature stories, the works exhibited here — each one made by a hospitalized child or group of children in Chicago — offer meticulously crafted views and re-views of the world and its contents, past and present.

Whether riffing on the fractal-like symmetry of butterflies, teasing apart vintage comic strips or photographs, or taking a magnifying glass to the tiny lives teeming in Lake Michigan, in these works the young artists of Snow City Arts explore the virtue, beauty, and mystery of the objects of our collective lives. The paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures, poems, and films displayed here offer a renewed perspective on our own distinct personal worlds while serving as a quiet reminder of their inherently recycled and universal nature, allowing us to see ourselves as both common and unique.