Nathan Meltz

In 1983, when I was 8 years old, my parents had a conversation around the dining room table in my hometown of Superior, Wisconsin, in the northern United States. They debated whether or not to let me watch the made for TV movie called The Day After, which was set to air that evening on network television. They decided that it couldn't be any worse than letting me watch Star Wars, so that evening I watched the premier of The Day After. The film showed atomic bombs reducing humans and animals to skeletons, and a city was blown to rubble.

For years afterwards, I went to bed praying that I would not be bombed to atomic oblivion while I slept. I worried about what our pet dog would do if the entire family died in a fireball. After the Day After is my attempt to come to terms with a lifetime of fear, distrust, and anxiety about nuclear annihilation by filtering a vision of destruction through my personal visual vocabulary of animated collage-based images.

Nathan Meltz

Director's Biography

Nathan Meltz uses collage, painting, printmaking, and animation to comment on the infiltration of technology into every facet of life, from politics and food, to family and war. Meltz's New York Exhibitions include the Woodstock Video Art Festival, the Catskill Film and Video Festival, the Chatham Farm Film Festival, the New York PBS affiliate WMHT series TV/Film, and solo exhibitions at the Thaddeus Kwiat Projects Gallery and Gallery 111 at the Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute. Nationally, he has exhibited at K Space Contemporary(TX,) where he was awarded the 2-D merit award, the 2010 Miami Fountain Art Fair, the Des Lee Gallery(MO), Landmark Arts at Texas Tech University, and has work in the upcoming 2012 Wisconsin Film Festival. Meltz exhibited prints, collage, and video at the IN Graafika Festival, Pärnu, Estonia, and has had his work featured in the publications Paper Politics, Sociological Images, Printeresting and the Mid America Print Council Journal.

A recent graduate of the State University of New York at Albany MFA program, Meltz is an Adjunct Professor of Printmaking at SUNY Albany and an Adjunct Professor of Foundations at the Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.

 

USA, 2011, 6 min, English Animation/Experimental Producer: Nathan Meltz Latin American Premiere The film remakes a section of the 1983 post-nuclear made-for- TV movie 'The Day After', retelling the story of atomic devastation in a Dada collage-meets-stop-animation style. The film showed atomic bombs reducing humans and animals to skeletons, and a city was blown to rubble.