Building tomorrow while erasing yesterday: a Frist exhibit exploring Nashville’s development
When John Warren is seeking inspiration, he walks and observes.
Wandering the streets of Nashville with a 16mm Bolex film camera, the lecturer in art is constantly on the hunt for his next project. While exploring the city, Warren noticed one object consistently appearing around him: construction cranes.
“The construction cranes began calling to me during my filmmaking walks—these skeletal figures puncturing the skyline, frozen mid-gesture,” Warren said. “They were everywhere, rewriting the city’s syntax, building tomorrow while erasing yesterday.”
Warren set about creating a superimposed shot of a subject that happened to have two cranes in the background. When he reviewed the footage, the overlapping exposures of the distant cranes generated a new idea.
“When you expose the same strip of film multiple times, you’re making a kind of archaeological record where each frame holds multiple moments,” Warren said. “I found myself thinking about palimpsests—those ancient manuscripts where earlier texts show through despite being overwritten. That’s what Nashville feels like now—yesterday bleeding through today’s surface—and what I wanted the film to embody, both formally and conceptually.”
Warren filmed on and off for seven years, with many of his shots taking place from 2017-2018. The resulting project is a 16mm experimental film loop called Future Tense that is currently featured in a Frist Art Museum exhibit, Avenues to a Great City, running now through December 14.
The exhibit, which is in collaboration with Nashville’s Civic Design Center, invites visitors to consider the complex art of civic design through an exploration of the growth of Nashville as envisioned in the center’s 2005 publication, The Plan of Nashville: Avenues to a Great City.
Through his film, Warren hopes to tell the story of the way capitalism acts as an invisible force that is powerful enough to reshape our entire environment, with the construction cranes acting as worker bees both captive to and complicit in the continuing rebuild.
While art is subjective, Warren said he hopes the film might make viewers more conscious of the change happening around them—that they notice not just what’s being built but what’s being displaced.
“These cranes won’t be here forever,” Warren said. “Nashville is changing at a pace that makes every film feel like a document of disappearance. But maybe that’s always been cinema’s condition—this attempt to hold light that’s already gone. What remains is this trace of attention paid to a moment of suspension, when the future was still being negotiated, even if the outcome felt predetermined.”