Hard as Opal, 2015, 29 minutes
“A soldier’s trip to Syria is complicated when he accidentally impregnates a friend. Meanwhile, a horse breeder from Ohio is driven away from home by her own desire to become pregnant. In Hard as Opal the lines between truth and fiction, fact and fantasy, are reined in and treated not as fixed, divisive markers but as malleable threads of narrative potential. Buckhiester and Leventhal perform alongside other non-actors who are filmed in their own varying domestic and professional environments. The result is a rich accumulation of narratives held together by questions concerning the nature of objectification, loneliness, and dissociative fantasy.”
—Brett Price
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Collaborative collages drawn from Hard as Opal
Jared Buckheister
Jared Buckhiester is a teaching artist at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. In 2012 he received an MFA in Sculpture from Bard College and in 1999 he received his BFA with a focus in Photography from Pratt Institute. Beginning in 2006 he has had solo exhibitions of his drawing and sculpture with Envoy Enterprises; Feature Inc.; Gallerie Du Jour, Paris; Thomas Rehbein, Cologne; and Dear Future Me, Brussels. He has been included in many group exhibitions including shows with Paul Kasmin, Cheim and Read, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. Buckhiester is the recipient of grants from the Dedalus Foundation for the Arts, and the Albert K. Murray Foundation. Since completing his MFA he has been a resident artist at Ox-Bow, Millay Colony, the Dedalus Foundation, and the Robert Blackburn Print Makers Workshop. Buckhiester was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant in 2016.