Interview for Double Exposure Film Festival

DX21: MEET THE DC ARTIST BEHIND THE IMAGE

Michael Crossett, the artist behind Double Exposure 2021’s look and feel for its seventh season, started out in advertising and marketing, later moving on to study art and graphic design at the Corcoran School of Art. He’s been a DC resident for 25 years, with local shows and commissions for the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Capital One Bank, and KPMG. A 95-foot cityscape mural he created graces the DC Department of Transportation. Mark Jenkins of the Washington Post has said Michael’s urban-imbued collages “court newcomers and natives alike with their complex strata and visual ingenuity.” 

Diana Jean Schemo, DX’s co-director, recently spoke to him about his vision and process for creating this year’s hero image for Double Exposure. 

DJS: Tell us a bit about yourself.  

MC: The first part of my life was heavy into marketing and advertising, and then I learned screen printing. I've always been a photographer, that's why documentary filmmaking is so attractive to me. I kind of lost touch with photography when it turned digital and I wasn't developing film because I love that portion of it and the magic that happens capturing the image and then exposing it... and then I learned screenprinting and it was the best of both worlds. You're able to capture all these images digitally and make some modifications to them or improve them, so that's kind of where I found my way with the art. 

DJS: Your collages have an unmistakable look and feel to them. How does the process connect to the result?

MS: It’s definitely an urban style and slightly gritty, not too rigid in composition but always allowing color to come through, and for people to... see stuff that develops over time.  A lot of my work contains, you know, 50 to 100 images in layers and I think over time, when people stare at a piece, they are able to absorb, to find small or intricate things that are happening within the design that I don't immediately shout out.   

DJS: How’s it different to create a commissioned piece vs. a piece you do for yourself?

MC: It’s really listening and collaborating with the people that I'm working with, and hearing the story that they want to be told, from an environment and atmosphere standpoint and feeling... Through years of graphic design and working in marketing, I'd learned to collaborate and work closely with people, and not allow my aesthetic to change but to use my aesthetic to tell their story in a kind of new and refreshing way. 

DJS: So when you approached this particular commission for DX21, what were the most salient guideposts as you worked?

MC: I was definitely inspired by the previous designs, they definitely convey the immediacy of journalism and documentary film. I think with a film festival, especially a documentary one, you always have to honor and look around at what is happening in the world, and in some way infuse that into the design without it becoming like this true representation of what's going on politically and socially in the country. 

I love the use of black and white in the past, but I thought as we're coming out of Covid and a year where things were darker, to add some brightness to it... [I was] looking at enduring love, and... there's like a light at the end of the tunnel... and capturing that with the black and white, but then it's infusing those yellow tones or the amber tones with a warmth that feels right. It's kind of projecting a feeling of hope or something brighter in the future, and then it kind of has a double meaning, like double exposure, it also references the burning of film and the raw energy behind filmmaking and the creation of a piece of film. 

The color perspective in the background is layers of concrete that I actually painted.

DJS: It feels kind of newspaperish.  

MC: Yeah, it feels like concrete and just like layers of information over each other, which I think is poignant, and then the fact that it is concrete you know these filmmakers and journalists are beating the pavement going all over traveling to try to find and tell these stories. 

The left side more represents what’s behind the scenes, so there are silhouettes of people shooting film on location, there's a strong image of an actual camera lens and then some treatment of reflections of lights and water on the ground, and then it sends light over to the swirl of images that are being captured. 

The first image stuck to me and you brought it up as enduring love, there's a picture of like an older couple walking through a tunnel in kind of an edgy or grittier part of town... they found true love and they are going on their pathway to more. Then there are two images: one’s a large image of a very busy scene in Times Square, and it's just supposed to be a lone woman walking down a European street... it's like isolation vs. back to congestion, or back to a crowded space.  

At the very top, there’s a child’s eye looking at a symmetrical piece of architecture, which resembles eyelashes. It’s looking to the future. There's nothing like a child that has such an open and clear mind for absorbing stuff, so it's kind of looking at the future and finding what's there.

And then the crosswalk, to me, there again, there is beautiful symmetry. It creates a nice feeling, and in some ways resembles film strips, the way it's being used vertically. But then, when you look closer, you see that it's an actual crosswalk. There's a separation of people by themselves, so there is isolation vs. congestion, but then you know each of those couples has its own story to be told.

Michael has two upcoming shows in Washington, DC. The first, a group show, opens Thursday from 6:00-8:00 p.m., and runs through the end of September at the Long View Gallery, 1234 Ninth Street, NW in Washington, DC.  The second opens October 2 from 6:00-8:00 p.m. at the Martha Spak Gallery at 60 District Square, SW at the DC Wharf, and runs through the end of October.