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"Visions of Hope" on view at ArtRage Gallery, Feb. 7 to March 21 2026
Essay-Interview by Anneka Herre,
Teens with a Movie Camera (TwMC) was started in 2023 by artists Lida and Mišo Suchý and Evan Bode as a free program guiding young creatives from Syracuse high schools in using the moving image as a tool of creative expression and empowerment. The program’s name pays homage to the influential 1929 film The Man with the Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov, which is filled with many of same wildly playful and inventive experiments in cinema—stop motion animation, split frames, formal montage—that we see in the beautiful films of TwMC on view in this exhibition.
TwMC has now nurtured the creative talents of four cohorts of young artists with the support of many local organizations, including the Community Foundation of CNY, Say Yes Syracuse, the North Side Learning Center and CNY Arts, as well as the Engaged Humanities Network, the Humanities Center, the College of Visual and Performing Arts and Light Work at Syracuse University, and in partnership with the Syracuse City School District. The program has blossomed into one of the most exciting arts programs for youth in Syracuse in a few short years. This exhibition is a testament to that incredible growth, the talent and creativity of the teen artists who have participated, and to the dedication and inspirational impact of the three artists at its center. At a moment when both the arts and the communities to which several of the teen artists belong are under attack, the work of Teens with a Movie Camera is both a model and an antidote to despair and disempowerment. In the words of TwMC’s motto:
Work with what you have. Where you are. Be smart, make ART!
Watching their work, I am reminded of when I saw Vertov’s film many years ago in art school. At some indeterminate point in the film, the image on the screen froze. Freeze frames are another formal device used by the filmmaker, so it took a moment for anyone to realize what had happened… starting from a small white hole in the middle of the frame, in an instant the image dissolved before our very eyes. The film had jammed in the projector and burned. Though it’s terrible to lose a film print, I can’t help but think Vertov would be delighted, because this connected the recorded past to the lived present in a way that transformed the film and everyone watching it. Much like that screening, TwMC is a point of connection between the lived experience of all the young artists with the whole history of filmmaking. I hope the questions below and the artists’ thoughtful responses capture some of that transformative energy.
-Anneka Herre
Program Director of Urban Video Project (UVP) at Light Work
Anneka:
Much of the imagery produced by TwMC is created with whatever was at-hand, both in terms of the subjects and the technology used. Most of the footage is shot on the teens’ own smartphones, not using multi-plane animation stands or 8k cameras. Quick hand-drawn sketches and simple paper cutouts taped to wires become stop motion animations and shadow plays.
It makes me think of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss’ idea of “bricolage”, which he framed as creatively “making do” with whatever is readily available. For Levi-Strauss, this capacity to make potentially infinite new meanings from limited sources—the ruins and detritus of culture—was the basis of myth. It is a bottom-up, rather than a top-down approach to understanding, interacting with, and building the world. It’s also a very playful approach.
Can you talk a little about this approach to making work with what is at-hand?
Lida:
We emphasize improvisation and play, reimagining visual materials into new forms, inviting discovery.
We share thoughtful artwork as reference points. With fresh eyes, teens respond in unexpectedly beautiful ways, combining seemingly incongruent elements from intuition and experience, and come to recognize that their instincts and ways of knowing are valuable—and worth trusting.
Charles [a past participant], using a projector and a white bed sheet, combined a moving image of the cosmos with the physical act of unfurling and refolding the sheet. While domestic and prosaic, this gesture, set against the vast, moving universe, transformed in scale and significance— making the simple action feel larger than itself.
Mišo:
I often make films and long-term photography projects in collaboration with friends, family, students, and communities. Instead of making films about “subjects,” I strive to work with people—co-creating, whether working with my mom on a fairy tale of swimming and flying across the ocean to visit her grandson, or with students and the Syracuse Community Choir on Giving Voice. Teens with a Movie Camera is an organic extension of my creative practice and research. An openness to collaboration can lead to unexpected outcomes; you simply need to be attuned to—and embrace—this kind of synergy.
We intentionally introduce teens to artists with connections to Syracuse or Central New York. We highlight Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table series. Yes, you can create powerful artwork in your kitchen, at your table—and some teens notice that. Maya Deren, who lived in Syracuse as a teen refugee from Ukraine, became a leading figure of American avant-garde experimental cinema. She embodies our motto and famously said, “I make my pictures for what Hollywood spends on lipstick.”
Anneka:
Part of your process is also about creating a nurturing environment for the teens, which we glimpse in the finished videos in the form of all the lovely foods — pineapples, coconuts, and oranges — that reappear as elements in the stop motion animations. Our overflowing mini-fridge at Light Work when TwMC was meeting there was a testament to the sheer abundance of hospitality.
It’s very clear that you are creating a community of care for the teens, which is all the more crucial because participants are also working with what is “at-hand” in the sense that they sometimes narrate their own stories, which vary from the near universal but nevertheless embarrassing struggle to “fit in” in high school to more traumatic experiences, such as coming to this country as a refugee. Interwoven with play, affirmation, and empowerment, there are these strands of reflection, confession, and vulnerability.
Can you talk about how you approach creating a community of care and how you balance vulnerability with empowerment?
Mišo:
Our get-togethers are creative microcinema production labs. We usually meet on Friday afternoons after a long school week, or during summer vacation. Instead of continuing school-like instruction, we try to avoid “teaching” or “training” per se. We look for playful and creative—yet rigorous—ways to explore working with media. We also share food. Alongside pizza and chicken wings, we try to include healthy snacks, vegetables, and fruit. I admit that when food shopping, I often choose fruits and vegetables with the idea of animating them!
Our approach to creating a community of care means working together, co-creating, eating and chit-chatting around one table, listening to each other (at least sometimes), creating a safe and supportive space for teen creativity, and laughing while also being serious. With TwMC, one “thingy” we aim for is to support teens—and ourselves—in growing from passive media consumers into media makers with their own agency. And yes, this comes with all sorts of vulnerability, and sometimes empowerment.
Evan:
Creativity suffers in an environment where you’re afraid to make mistakes, because you deny yourself the freedom to try new things, break rules, and embrace unknown outcomes. Our agenda is not to impose or police a rigid definition of technical “correctness” in filmmaking. I’d rather uplift and encourage a spirit of enthusiastic, honest personal expression where a fear of making art “wrong” is not a concern. We see beauty in imperfection, so we’re not trying to stamp it out.
I know what it’s like to struggle with anxiety as a young person. It takes courage to share one’s voice and to believe it’s worthy of sharing in the first place. If a single participant leaves with greater confidence in themselves and their own creative perspective after collaborating with us, then this project is worth all the hard work it takes to produce.
Anneka:
There is a lot of imagery in these videos that actively deconstructs the imaginative worlds that participants build together. We don’t just see the finished product. We see teens playing with a phenakistoscope wheel and discovering the wonder of a simple camera obscura made by punching a hole in a piece of cardboard duct-taped to a window. We hear the giggles in the background and see the hand at the edge of the frame holding the puppet, the three “bad” takes before the good one, and the video chopped up in the timeline of the editing software before the final cut. We even see the young artists watching their creations projected onto the Everson Museum during a public screening UVP, recording it on their phones to become a fond memory… or perhaps the building block for their next project. There is a self-reflexive, iterative, recursive element in all of these videos.
Can you talk a little about the decision to both embrace “movie magic” and also reveal the slight-of-hand?
Mišo:
The creative process of artmaking can be as interesting and important, if not more so, than the actual outcome. This is also a nod—an intertextual reference—to Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, an experiment in cinematic poetry, void of plot or script. In this self-reflexive movie, the viewer is deliberately brought into the process of the film’s making, projection, and viewing. Made nearly a hundred years ago, this “silent” film is still dazzling and visionary.
Using simple tools to make filmmaking accessible to everyone, TwMC invites teens, their friends, and families to create small, personal movies using what they have, including smartphones. There is a rich tradition of personal and creative cinema outside the commercial mainstream. Film can be full of imagination, fantasy, creativity, and invention, and it can be made on a shoestring—or “0”—budget.
Evan:
When editing the material for public presentation, I didn’t want to lose sight of the beautiful and interesting moments happening behind the camera as well as in front of it. Right away, our name, “Teens with a Movie Camera” asks audiences to consider the filmmakers’ presence behind the lens, drawing attention to the artists instead of making them invisible. Whenever you point a camera at something, or project it on a screen, you’re saying it matters. By looking at the process, we’re saying it matters as much as the outcome.
Essential moments that could be concealed as “behind the scenes” material reveal a larger narrative we’re telling across all the works, about what it means to be creative. Movie magic offers a playground of possibilities for reimagining our everyday world as something alive and malleable, in our hands to change. When we create things, we exercise agency in relationship to reality rather than accepting “the way things are” as passive observers. We start to see our world as a construction project where nothing is fixed and everything could be imagined otherwise. For me, that way of thinking offers a vital source of hope.
Lastly, blurring the border between process and product shifts power dynamics in relation to the observer. Transparency disrupts gatekeeping in the arts. Pulling back the curtain and revealing the trick doesn’t lessen the magic—it invites others into it, reducing barriers to access. I hope our audience will leave feeling empowered to make art of their own.
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