Jeremy Drummond, an art professor of experimental film, video art, and alternative media in the art & art history department, has always loved movies, beginning with his high school years as a video store clerk in Vancouver, British Columbia. As an art school undergraduate, he tried his hand at painting and printmaking but found his true medium after meeting visiting video artist Steve Reinke.

“At the time, his work had shown at the Museum of Modern Art and a bunch of other places. He was what you might call an art star. He introduced me to video as an art form, and it just immediately clicked,” said Drummond. By the time Drummond was in his fourth year, Reinke had introduced him to numerous people in the field. Before he graduated, he had a piece premiering at the New York Underground Film Festival.

Today, Drummond enjoys being of similar support to his students — many who arrive with preconceived notions of the medium. He takes them through what he describes as an unlearning process. “There are no rules,” he tells them.

A past winner of the Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award, he works closely with students in the visual and media arts practice (VMAP) program and introduces them to other leading contemporary artists in film and video when they come to campus through his Frames of Reference series.

“The series is an annual program that showcases some of the most creative, challenging, thoughtful and visionary artists working in film and video today,” Drummond said. “And the mission is to show media that resists conventions and ideologies of mainstream media and explores creative, innovative approaches to narrative.”

On the kidney-shaped coffee table in his office, there’s a stack of still-sealed posters for the series, which begins Sept. 23, and is now in its second year. This fall, visual artists Deborah Stratman, JP Sniadecki, and Kevin Jerome Everson will show their films, participate in a Q&A session, and meet with a group of students over a two-day period. Brett Story, Tiffany Sia, and Tom Sherman will follow in the spring. Reinke, his mentor, was among the visiting artists last year.

“When these people come in, they have classroom discussions, they critique student works,” he said. “I don’t know another school where undergraduate students have studio visits with that caliber of artist — and six of them a year!”

With small classes, state-of-the-art studios, and access to renowned artists, it’s not surprising that VMAP students have a 100% acceptance rate to MFA programs, including the elite programs at New York University and the University of California, he said.

This past summer, Drummond finished editing two of his films and completed production of a third. Because he works without a script and follows an organic process, his films can take years to take form. Case in point: His new collage-based film, Monument, began about 14 years ago, with him taking photos of the close-to-20-foot-tall busts that resided in Presidents Park in Williamsburg, Virginia. Not long after his visit, the park closed, and the busts were relocated.

Then, during the pandemic, he filmed footage during the protests and celebrations around the removal of a Confederate statue on Monument Avenue. He also gathered video shot collectively by others in the community.

He visited the busts in their new location in 2021 and found them dilapidated. “They were left sitting in a field, abandoned, and falling apart. The back of Lincoln’s head is gone. They are these horrific-looking monuments that are daunting to walk around,” he said. "I knew I had to film them — they were a perfect point of juxtaposition to everything I had been recording on Monument Avenue in the summer of 2020."

“I shot that footage with a Super 8 and hand-processed the film using a 19th-century technique that lifts the emulsion off the film, so it almost looks like a veiled blanket that's flowing off of the faces.”

In Monument, he brought together the two subjects — the presidential busts and the protests — and intermingled the video with the Super 8 film.

“At times, it becomes very abstract, very layered. You see different things happening at different times, depending on where you're looking at the screen,” he said. “But it's like forward momentum of celebration, of looking at monuments and times changing.” The film has been acquired for international distribution and will be entered into film festivals and gallery exhibitions. Drummond also hopes to present the film locally in the near future.

Note: If the above photo gallery does not properly display, please try refreshing your browser.