Minute Movies Wall: 2011-2021
11’ 11” x 10’ 7.5”, digital prints with wallpaper paste, 2024
Minute Movies: The Daily Diary Video Work of Julie Perini was an exhibition involving video and photography along with several community programming events. The work emerged out of my long-term daily practice of creating a 60-second, single-take video each day, called a Minute Movie. What began in 2011 as an exercise in creativity has developed into a daily ritual, a mindfulness practice, a way to accumulate memories. Most videos are meditative with minimal compositions, taking a long look at the present moment. Some videos resemble home movies, capturing intimate moments with friends, family, and pets. Minute Movies have become a background rhythm to my life, a place to create freely with no pressure to make a finished product. Each month I label the month’s videos with the date and tuck them away into a hard drive. This work offers a model for a slow, thoughtful, savored cinematic practice.
In 2021, partly in response to the outpouring of personal storytelling and general introspection that emerged during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, I began to catalog the Minute Movies, creating a custom, searchable database. Perini worked closely with production assistant Max Swanson, meeting regularly over the course of two years. Each catalog entry contains information about the Minute Movie’s formal characteristics, subject matter, emotional resonances, and memories.
This past September - October 2024, I presented the exhibition at Millennium Film Workshop in New York that contained a new large-scale photographic work composed of nearly 5,000 still image thumbnails from the Minute Movies archive, along with several videos on monitors, a screening event, artist tours of the work and a workshop for working artists, tailored specifically for this exhibition called “Tending to the Archive.” The centerpiece of the exhibition was Minute Movies Wall: 2011-2021, which was a 11’ 11” x 10’ 7.5” wall covering, made of digital prints and adhered with wallpaper paste. The wall covering is a huge collage of still images from the Minute Movies archive.