Boston-born and Auburn-raised artist/filmmaker James N. Kienitz Wilkins is making a name for himself in the art world in Brooklyn, and beyond.

He has been making films most of his life, and is in the midst of a flourishing career. He went to Edward Little High School through his junior year, then attended Cooper Union Art School in New York in 2006. Wilkins has received awards and critical acclaim for his work. He most recently was chosen to be part of the Whitney Biennial, a prestigious honor in the art world.

We asked him to talk about his art films and the upcoming Whitney Biennial.

Q: How long have you been making art and films?

A: I guess I should describe myself as an artist/filmmaker. I make short and feature films, and I dabble in other forms and mediums. I live and work in Brooklyn, New York.

I’ve been making movies and art since I was a kid. It’s something I’ve always done and have been lucky to hone as an adult, attending art school in New York City (Cooper Union) and now dedicating my life to it.

I started writing screenplays with my friend Jeff Phillips when we were in fourth grade. Once we got our hands on a video camera in fifth grade, there was no stopping us. Early inspirations include “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Wayne’s World 2.” Later, I got into foreign films, documentaries and American independent stuff. This was right around when the Internet hit, so there was no YouTube: still had to source DVDs and VHS tapes, or get lucky when something unusual came to Portland, like David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive”: a memorable teenage experience. My short videos started winning some prizes at the Maine Student Film and Video Festival (Waterville) and then I went to Cooper, where I was introduced to the world of experimental film and video art.

My current work is a mix (perhaps an appreciation) of all these genres and forms. In fact, for me, making movies has always been about building things, drawing, writing, making music — it’s an ideal way to synthesize many mediums.

Q: What was your initial reaction to hearing you were chosen for the Biennial? How are you feeling about it now?

A: Being chosen for the Biennial is an honor and also makes sense: I work my ass off! Of course it’s nice that people seem to be responding to my work, particularly since it’s so noncommercial. The Whitney Biennial is basically a huge group art show. A team of curators and film programmers tour the country for a year meeting with artists, having conversations, putting together a theme that reflects the current moment in contemporary art. Artists usually show work made in the past two years, and sometimes unveil new stuff. I’ll be screening work in the film program. The show opens in March and runs through June. It’s the first biennial in the new downtown Manhattan building.

Q: How did growing up in Maine shape or influence your art?

A: I moved to Maine from Boston when I was 6. I like Maine and it will always be a part of my life. It’s a pretty relaxed place. Lewiston/Auburn wasn’t the most exciting place in the world when I was a kid, but we found ways to have fun. I made hundreds of movies with my friends. As a teenager, I’d trawl the darkened streets of downtown Lewiston with my friend, Aaron Frank (who also went to Cooper Union and is an artist in Brooklyn) and others, taking photos and making movies and engaging in all kinds of sub-legal activity. Sometimes we’d develop our photos at the Sun Journal, where Aaron’s dad worked. Once we snuck in the Olin Arts Center at Bates College and hid under the movie theater seats until the security guard did his rounds and the building was closed for the night, triumphantly emerging to watch DVDs on the big screen. We taped latches on the doors and everything. Would probably get booked by Homeland Security if we did it today!

Around that time, I was interning at Maine Public Broadcasting in Lewiston and learned a lot about documentary film. I think I may have made the first documentary in Maine featuring the then-recent Somali immigrants. It was a short video about the interactions and goings-on in Kennedy Park. It wasn’t very good, but maybe worth digging up for anthropological purposes.

I’ve also been interested in how Lewiston/Auburn has changed over the years, adding more and more box stores and becoming a more commercial exurban environment despite Maine’s reputation for unadulterated nature. This obviously connects to issues in my film, Public Hearing, as well as some other work.

Q: What other kinds of work have you done?

A: A good place to start is my feature-length experimental documentary, Public Hearing (2012), which premiered at the Copenhagen Documentary Festival (CPH:DOX) in 2012, and has screened all over the world. It played in Maine at the 2013 Camden International Film Festival. Public Hearing is the reenactment (or re-performance) of a real transcript from a small town public hearing in upstate New York about a Wal-Mart expanding to becoming a Super Wal-Mart. Using the transcript as if it were a screenplay, I cast over 25 actors to perform it word-for-word. Additionally, the movie was filmed on black-and-white 16mm film entirely in close-up shots. It was an attempt to “cinematize” an otherwise boring, bureaucratic document: something archived but never meant to be revisited. It’s two hours long. I call it a “didactic comedy”.

My recent work is a number of short films produced between 2014 – 2016 which use spoken monologue as the main technique. Three of these have been dubbed the “Andre” trilogy because of a recurring yet absent character who ties together the stories. I should point out that these movies aren’t going to win any Academy Awards. I’m not interested in moral points, or showing off my technical skills. I’m not looking to get hired by anybody. I’m totally uninterested in making movies that are like movies we’ve seen before. I don’t think of filmmaking as a job in this way (I fund my work with grants, fellowships and awards). So these movies might be better considered experiments in thinking. In a way, they are quite personal. Each wrestles with a different set of concerns. For instance, Special Features (2014) was taped on an old MiniDV camcorder that was being thrown out by a TV station. The backstory of camera technology plays a part in the actors’ monologues (who are recounting a dream I had). The same is true for TESTER (2015), which is a voiceover by a fictional private eye applied to “found footage”: a thirty minute unedited videotape I found in a VCR. And finally, B-ROLL with Andre (2015) is a meditation on the questionable promises of “resolution” — image resolution, story resolution, moral resolution.

My most recent short is called Indefinite Pitch (2016). The simplest way to describe it is as a documentary essay film. It’s all voice over still images of the Androscoggin River. The narrator (who is me) begins with a very bad movie pitch that leads to the discovery of a lost movie serial filmed in 1927 in Berlin, New Hampshire (where the river begins), and ends with very personal anecdotes from Lewiston/Auburn. The approach might be called “psychogeography”: a discursive and ambiguous look at how places and spaces affect people. I get into a lot of detail. Maine’s reigning clown, Gov. LePage, even has a cameo with an analysis of his well-documented racist outbursts. Indefinite Pitch premiered this year at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, and has gone on to the New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and many places. It recently played nearby at the Montreal International Documentary Festival and the Camden International Film Festival in Camden/Rockport.

Q: What’s next?

A: In addition to the Biennial, I’m premiering a feature length documentary later next year, and have some other projects in development. No rest for the weary; life’s too short and unpredictable to slow down.

The Whitner Biennial opens March 17, 2017, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. 

To keep up with James N. Kienitz Wilkins’ work, you can visit his website at automaticmoving.com and watch trailers for his films at vimeo.com/jnkw.

* In 2015, Wilkins’ film “Special Features” won the Founder’s Spirit Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Innovative Technique Award at Chicago Underground Film Festival, and Grand Prix at 25 FPS Experimental Film Festival in Croatia.

* In 2016, his film “B-ROLL with Andre” won the ART AWARD at LICHTER Film Festival in Frankfurt, Germany.

* In 2016, his film “Indefinite Pitch” won the Kazuko Trust Award from Film Society of Lincoln Center at the New York Film Festival.