Summer McCorkle completed her M.F.A. at Hunter College. She works in moving and still imagery. Her last project, des abends, was filmed in the countryside of Finland and at MacDowell. This two-channel video piece combines a fictional narrative recounted over images of snowy landscapes, with excerpts from Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein woven throughout. McCorkle wrote and filmed this piece over a period of time while her father grappled with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. The film resembles a visual poem that explores memory, discovery, loss, and the struggle to comprehend an unfamiliar world. During her 2022 stay at MacDowell, she worked on the script and video edit for an experimental narrative video piece, albedo, which is shot in the Arctic Circle and Death Valley. albedo imagines a post-apocalyptic future through the eyes of a woman who has fled the city and gets lost in the desert, experiencing hallucinations of a time of ice and snow, long before she was born, through the eyes of a sailor on a boat in the Arctic Sea. The piece is a visual dialog between the two unique desert geographies -- blue glaciers, snow covered mountains and icy seascapes are contrasted with hot bright pastel rock formations and cracked dry desert ground. McCorkle was awarded an artist in residency at Montello Foundation in Nevada in November 2021, an artist residency at the Arctic Circle in 2019 and exhibited her last video installation des abends at Smack Mellon in March 2020.
Summer McCorkle
Studios
Van Zorn (formerly Kirby)
Summer McCorkle worked in the Van Zorn (formerly Kirby) studio.
Constructed thanks to a bequest from Sarah L. Kirby, Kirby Studio was the last new building to be erected during Mrs. MacDowell’s leadership (1907-1951). The load-bearing masonry walls were laid by local mason Augustus Beaulieu atop a fieldstone foundation. A 1995 renovation preserved the brick fireplace with wooden mantel and…