Gary Popovich

“A short study of the impossible relationship between a camera and a tree.”

Images Film and Video Festival, 1989

“As the title suggests, Gary Popovich’s Caress has a tactile quality. Popovich uses a handheld, rapidly moving camera to generate an abstract of a tree in his own yard. The film thus makes strange the familiar—both the everyday object that we all regularly see and the particular object that the filmmaker saw and experienced literally every day.”

Blaine Allan, Princess Court Cinema Program Notes

“Caress confines its jolting expression to a tree, lensed with a vigorous agitation that shakes the flowering stalk of generations into tremors of light and shadow.”

Mike Hoolboom

“Extremely rapid camera movements in Gary Popovich’s Caress…convey something of the eye’s engagement with the dark shapes and surges of light at the peripheries of the visual field.”

William Wees, “The Visual Aspect” Tour Catalogue

“April light, silvery branches, craggy bark with deep set shadows, standing tall in the blue sky. How do you embrace a tree that has given you four years of pleasure? Two weeks before I moved away I painted its portrait with my camera—slinging modesty aside, I took it when it was most naked and exposed myself with it—bending light in tender, passionate strokes.”

Gary Popovich