Brian Rogers

(Queens, NY / Lenapehoking)

Small Songs

DESCRIPTION

Small Songs is an abstract auto-fictional travelogue—and a love letter to the late visual artist Nancy Holt—made from footage captured during several cross-country road trips, including a visit to Holt's landmark work, Sun Tunnels, between 2021 and 2024. A deeply personal solo project entirely shot, scored, and edited by Brian Rogers, the film borrows audio material from Small Songs, the album, a related collection of very short synthesizer compositions released in 2023.

Upon visiting Holt's austere and iconic concrete cylinders, which incongruously dominate and merge with their surroundings, Rogers began to see the artwork’s shapes and its relationship to the landscape in nearly everything; this experience profoundly influenced the imagery and direction of the film as it took shape.

Deploying repetition to guide its narrative, the film continuously loops back as it pushes forward, charting an emotional chronology while placing images, locations, totems, and landmarks outside of the march of linear time and physical space. The result is a granular and intimate portrait of one person's experience of scale and time, simultaneously disorienting and deeply grounding, in a world in flux. 

Locations (partial and approximate, 2021–2024): Sun Tunnels, Wendover, UT; Queens, NY; Callicoon, NY; Bonneville Salt Flats, UT; Colorado Springs, CO; White Sands, NM; Badlands, SD; Dinosaur, CO; Dawson, NM; Casper, WY; Jackson, WY; Idaho Falls, ID; Craters of the Moon National Monument & Preserve, ID; Los Angeles, CA; City Island, NY; Boulder, CO; Winter Harbor, ME; Mesilla, NM; Vieques, PR; Montreal, CAN; Hobart, AU; Brooklyn, NY; Natchez, MS; Radium Springs, NM; Marfa, TX; Big Spring, TX; Organ, NM; Venice, IT; Gila Cliff Dwellings, Mimbres, NM; Austin, TX; Lyon, FR; Navasota, TX; Vancouver Island, CA; San Francisco, CA; Paris, FR; Joshua Tree, CA; Jackson, WY; Vicksburg, MS; Mos, TN; Roswell, NM; Ruidoso, NM. 

Previous Screenings: 
Rimi (O)utpost Flørli (Norway): June 6, 2025
The Cannery (Penobscot, MN): August 5, 2025
Revolutions Per Minute Festival (Boston, MA): December 10, 2025

Small Songs, the album (2023), is a long-form recording of textural synthesizer music.

In late 2019, while at an artist residency, Rogers assembled more than 100 hours of audio material recorded solo, generally late at night, using a modular synthesizer. Throughout 2020 and 2021, these recordings were meticulously (and exhaustively) condensed and sequenced into twenty-nine very short compositions (or “small songs”) which unfold as a kind of abstract, auditory, autofictional narrative of shifting interior states informed by a month-long solo cross-country road trip Rogers undertook in 2021. Writer and cultural critic Claudia La Rocco composed the song titles in the form of a 29-line poem. The recordings were mastered by Stephan Mathieu, and the album was pressed in a very limited edition of vinyl LPs.

Small Songs, the album, is composed, recorded, and mixed by Brian Rogers; mastered by Stephan Mathieu; and features song titles by Claudia La Rocco and cover art by Michael Reardon.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Brian Rogers is a theater and film director, video and sound artist, and performing arts curator. Since 1997, Rogers has created films, performances, albums, and other time-based projects, including Small Songs (2023-2024); Screamers (2018); Hot Box (2012, co-presented with FIAF’s Crossing The Line Festival, PS122’s COIL Festival, Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, and supported by a MAP Fund grant); and the Bessie-nominated Selective Memory (2010). Rogers composed the soundtrack for Shaun Iron & Lauren Petty’s film Standing By: Gatz Backstage and has collaborated as a sound and video artist with numerous experimental dance and theater artists in New York and elsewhere. Rogers is a MacDowell Fellow and has had residencies at Yaddo and Mount Tremper Arts. 

Rogers is the Co-Founder and Artistic Executive Director of The Chocolate Factory Theater, an internationally recognized venue for experimental dance, theater, and interdisciplinary performance based in Queens, NY. Now in its twenty-second year, Rogers serves as chief curator of The Chocolate Factory Theater’s artistic programming and leads its artistic and administrative operations.

Rogers has taught at Kenyon College, University of Michigan, University of Colorado, The School at The Art Institute of Chicago, St. John’s University, Carnegie Mellon University, Sarah Lawrence College, The New School, New York University, Princeton University, and others. He has served as a panelist/recommender for New York State Council on the Arts, Queens Council on the Arts, Fresh Tracks, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Creative Capital, Pew Charitable Trust, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, Yaddo, Macdowell, MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim Fellowship, and others. Rogers is a graduate of Bennington College.

ADDITIONAL THANKS

Pieter Ampe, Giorgos Antoniou, Sae Bosco and Samos Volunteers, Yannick Christian, Hani Dunia, Effi & Amir, Tim Etchells, Katy Fallon, Martin Hampton, Britt Hatzius, Leo Kay, LAPS, Camille Louis, Eva Neklyaeva, Beyhan Onur, Anelka Tavares, Prodromos Tsinikoris, Giulia de Vecchi, Anny Y