Story by Shayan Saalabi | P hotos by Allison Barr | Design by Olivia Boryczewski PHASES COME AND GO BUT ART IS FOREVER. “I was dumb and didn’t tell people to follow me on Instagram,” filmmaker and photographer Maris Jones says of Vine’s twilight. Jones, a New Yorker by way of Philadelphia, amassed hundreds of thousands of followers on the video sharing app during its brief heyday. “I was home after college and I was bored and looking at these Vines and I thought, ‘You know, I think I can make these,’” Jones adds. “The first few were terrible, but you gotta’ start somewhere, so I slowly started doing it and, almost immediately, whatever I was holding inside of me for so long came out.” What Jones was holding inside her was a cinematographic style dripping in saturated 1980s energy. “When I first left school, I thought I was going to be an editor, which is hilarious to me now,” Jones says of her transition to Vine-making and eventually full-fledged filmmaking. “My parents were artists, so I think I was having a hard time being artsy -- I think I was trying to hide that, like my rebellion was to be what people perceive as ‘normal’, but you can’t hide who you are.” If you watch Jones’s early Vines -- you can still pull up compilations on Youtube -her ingenuity immediately comes through. Limited by their six-second timeframe, most Vines were unedited, with only enough room for a crude joke or some slap to the face. However, Jones’s Vines are incredibly thought-out and wellproduced, a stark contrast to a majority of the content at the time. In one, a hand-painted cutout of David Bowie chants “We can be heroes” in stop-motion. In another, Jones, a blue headband holding back her blonde Glam Metal locks, strums a white electric guitar, each strum sending off a beam of yellow lightning. There are plenty more, though each is unique in six seconds or less.
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