EXPERIMENTAL VIDEOS & HOMEGROWN STORIES!

SELECTED: BIDEODROMO--Experimental Film & Video Fest in Bilbao, Spain: October 2025

and

LIVING WITH BUILDINGS FESTIVAL- VIII: People, Poetry, Space - Screening in Coventry, United Kingdom, July 2025

GRAPEFRUIT PARTS: This collaboration was inspired by Yoko Ono and the serendipity of chance. It is our second chance operation/collaboration, both videos were inspired by Yoko Ono and her book "Grapefruit". Our first collaborative video was called "fuze".

Homegrown Stories (http://homegrownstories.com/) has been nurturing creative collaborations for many years. This year (2024) we were interested in creating a more hands-on collaborative project among our loyal and talented collaborators. We invited sound and image artists who have contributed great work in the past to take part in this year’s Homegrown Stories theme – The Serendipity Project.

Twelve individuals were formed into six collaborative pairs. The pair of artists selected a title for their video piece and a designated length. They then worked separately with one collaborator creating a soundtrack inspired by the title and the other creating a silent image track. At a designated time, these two separate tracks were combined.

Using collage, organic image, music as sound, and a variety of structural schemes, these collaborative videos reveal the random magic of Serendipity.

Image: LeAnn Erickson

Sound: Sandra Louise Dyas

 DOUBLE VISION - MOTHER/DAUGHTER EXHIBITION

VOICES STUDIO - DUBUQUE, IOWA

June 6 - July 26, 2005

Two Way Lens and Sandra Dyas

 THE TRUTH OF BEAUTY

BY MICHAEL WERNER

JUNE 20, 2010

Two Way Lens and Sandra Dyas

Two Way Lens proudly presents Sandra Dyas

I am very happy and excited that I can add another wonderful photographer to my project. This month's photographer is Sandra Dyas. Sandra is a photographer and teacher based in Iowa City, Iowa. Her work is widely exhibited and published and she was selected to be the photographer for Iowa for The 50 States Project.

Please visit Sandra's website for more work to see, and of course, Sandra's blog is worth a visit too.

But now it's time to read Sandra's very insightful interview for Two Way Lens.

Katie in Her Wedding Dress, Iowa City, Iowa, from the series Holding On; Portraits of People I Know

Susan with the Red Tomato, near Andrew, Iowa, from the series Holding On; Portraits of People I Know

The Poodle in Berlin, from the series Heaven & Earth

Boy with Beads, Mardi Gras, Lafayette, Louisiana, from the series The Lost Nation Photographs

James and the Pronghorn, Iowa City, Iowa, from the series The Lost Nation Photographs

Steve Roling, Rolly World, near Bellevue, Iowa, from The 50 States Project

Sophie's Birthday, from the series Heaven & Earth

Pieta Brown, Coralville, Iowa, from the series Down to the River; Portraits of Iowa Musicians

Chloe Swimming, Iowa City, Iowa, from the series Holding On; Portraits of People I Know

Nya with Long Braids, Iowa City, Iowa

© copyright all images Sandra Dyas

 

Grapefruit Parts 

by Sandra Louise Dyas 

and LeAnn Erickson

ON MOVING POEMS : POETRY IN VIDEO FORM

A second film by old friends Sandy Dyas and LeAnne Erickson for The Serendipity Project, which we introduced with their earlier video, fuze. In the description on Vimeo, Dyas notes, “This collaboration was inspired by Yoko Ono and the serendipity of chance. It is our second chance operation/collaboration, both were inspired by Yoko Ono and her book “Grapefruit”.”

As in fuze, Erickson’s selection of images and Dyas’s selection of sound clips do seem to be in conversation—an uncanny effect, which I think says as much about the nature of collaboration between seasoned artists who know what they’re doing as it does about the nature of videopoetry. One thinks of the famous quote by Louis Pasteur: “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

Most of us amateur video-makers quickly discover that random mixes of text, sound and images tend to result in little more than a vaguely poetic fog. One of the reasons that Dyas and Erickson don’t fall into that trap, I think, is because they deploy fairly limited vocabularies of images and words or phrases: poetry lives in rhythm and repetition. And viewers can be relied upon to fill in semantic gaps, because that’s basically what we’re doing all day long with snatches of overheard conversation and chance fragments of others’ lives, consciously or unconsciously looking for connective threads—and regularly stepping back to try to see larger patterns. Any good poet, whether for the page or the screen, understands this instinctively: you have to leave a certain number of gaps for the audience to fill or leap on their own. That’s how the poetry happens. And it’s definitely happening here.