Nature Night: Wetlands: A Documentary

"Wetlands" is a feature length documentary film collaboration between painter Deborah DeWit and filmmaker Carl Vandervoort. It tells the story of a year in the studio and a year in a small piece of the natural world–the site of a former dairy farm, a “postage-stamp wilderness” surrounded by suburbia, adjacent to a sewage treatment plant–which has been both her inspiration and a major subject of her work since the early 2000s. Deborah’s voice weaves the narrative thread, her paintings provide many of the visuals, and her ideas about art and life the will form the philosophical core of this story. Alongside this aesthetic approach to exploring our need for nature we examine the scientific and practical restoration process, the goal of which is to enhance and protect our native habitat.

Portraying a year of seasonal and artistic changes, “Wetlands” explores themes of the artistic impulse, the internal process of art making, and the nexus of nature and art. The film explores DeWit’s ideas and feelings of responsibility as an artist to use her creativity to explore truths of the natural experience and the value for all of us in encountering, preserving and enlarging the “wild” world. This film seeks to illuminate, educate and inspire a change in the ways we live.

Nature Night is FREE and open to the public. Location: Heron Hall, Audubon House, 5151 NW Cornell Rd.