John Warren’s (Film/Video MFA 12) 16mm film Future Tense is featured in the Frist Art Museum’s exhibition Avenues to a Great City in Nashville. The show, in collaboration with the Civic Design Center, invites viewers to consider the city’s rapid growth through the lens of civic design. It remains on view at the Conte Community Arts Gallery through Dec. 14.
The filmmaker, a Nashville native, was struck by the ubiquity of construction cranes throughout Nashville as he began filming in 2017. “The construction cranes began calling to me during my filmmaking walks—these skeletal figures puncturing the skyline, frozen mid-gesture. They were everywhere, rewriting the city’s syntax, building tomorrow while erasing yesterday,” he told Nashville’s Vanderbilt University.
Future Tense, John Warren (2017-2025)
When composing a superimposed image of two cranes, Warren hit upon the visual cue for capturing the past and present of the city.
“When you expose the same strip of film multiple times, you’re making a kind of archaeological record where each frame holds multiple moments. 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,” he said.
You can watch the 9-minute film in the embedded link above.
Warren also has a new film installation included in Studio Sessions, the opening exhibition of Vanderbilt University’s Space 204 gallery for the 2025–26 season.
He began teaching Video Art and Fundamentals of Film/Video Production at Vanderbilt in 2013, and now lectures on Art and Cinema at the university.
