JANIE GEISER

JANIE GEISER

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JANIE GEISER
  • ARBOR

    From a set of photographs found in a thrift store, Geiser creates a liminal space between representation and abstraction, figure and landscape, fiction and memory. ARBOR suggests the fragility and ephemerality of memory and its artifacts through subtle manipulations of the photographs: reframings...

Extras

  • CATHODE GARDEN

    A young woman moves between light and dark, life and death; a latter day Persephone. The natural world responds accordingly. Neglected negatives, abandoned envelopes, botanical and anatomical illustrations along with found home-made recordings re-order themselves, collapsing and re-emerging in he...

  • THE FLOOR OF THE WORLD

    In a shifting landscape of dirt and sky, excavation and construction merge. Figures move back and forth between life and death (and possibly somewhere else). The ephemerality of existence is a mundane question in this world, where numbers mark the way. The floor of the world turns out to be easil...

  • FLOWERS OF THE SKY

    FLOWERS OF THE SKY (a medieval term for comets) draws on two panoramic photographs found in a Los Angeles thrift shop that depict a gathering of members of the Eastern Star, a Masonic order. In the first photograph, taken at a banquet meal, the participants are seated at tables and face the camer...

  • THE FOURTH WATCH

    The ancient Greeks divided the night into four sections; the last watch before morning was called the fourth watch. In the hours before dawn, an endless succession of rooms is inhabited by silent film figures occupying the flickering space in a mid-century house made of printed tin. Their presenc...

  • GHOST ALGEBRA

    Under erratic skies, a solitary figure navigates a landscape of constructed nature and broken bones. She peers through a decaying aperture, waiting and watching: the fragility of the body is exposed for what it is: ephemeral, liquid, a battlefield of nervous dreams. Using found and natural objec...

  • THE HUMMINGBIRD WARS

    A theatrical fiction, collapsing time-and-place: turn-of-the-last-century performers apply stage makeup as if for war, to engage in battle for the soul of the world. The injuries are more emotional than physical but cut deeply just the same. A visual/aural collage film, THE HUMMINGBIRD WARS sugge...

  • IMMER ZU

    IMMER ZU is an elliptical, experimental animated film that evokes a mysterious undercover world of secret messages, cryptic language and indecipherable codes. Shot in luminous black-and-white, IMMER ZU uses miniature two- and three-dimensional figures and sets, as well as shadow puppetry, to sugg...

  • LOOK AND LEARN

    LOOK AND LEARN excavates the visual vocabulary we use to operate and construct the daily world. The film explores the juxtaposition of two material image forms: visual instructions (assembly guides, photography manuals, maps, diagrams) and photographs, mainly a set of several 1950s-era elementary...

  • LOST MOTION

    LOST MOTION uses small cast metal figures, toy trains, decayed skyscrapers and other found objects to follow a man’s search for a mysterious woman. From an illegible note found on a dollhouse bed, through impossible landscapes, the man waits for her train that never arrives. His wanderings lead ...

  • THE RED BOOK

    THE RED BOOK is an elliptical, pictographic animated film that uses flat, painted figures and collage elements in both two and three-dimensional settings to explore the realms of memory, language and identity from the point-of-view of a woman amnesiac. The film suggests the ways in which language...

  • REVERSE SHADOW

    Rivers run red, planes hover above the water, ships travel in darkness and towers loom and topple. Disaster seems imminent as the hunters prepare to shoot. The body is a soft target.

    REVERSE SHADOW draws on a range of sources, from target-practice games for children, brochures of WWII war planes...

  • RICKY

    The realms of childhood, war and loss echo through RICKY. Double-vision illuminates (and simultaneously obfuscates) what can be remembered, lost or retrieved. A found-sound recording forms the spine of the film... a scratched audio-letter from father to son.

    "Multiple pasts come alive in Geiser’...

  • SILENT SISTER

    An elliptical meditation on the body, illness, landscape and time. In SILENT SISTER, the body is turned out, invaded, examined. Using medical illustrations, charts, photographs of abandoned hospitals, miniatures and photographs of pre-suburban Los Angeles (which was a haven for the chronically il...

  • VALERIA STREET

    The starting point for VALERIA STREET was a frayed Kodak box of seven slides that fell off a shelf of collage materials in the studio of the filmmaker. Curious, she put them on a light box. The slides depicted a group of five men, staged around a conference table in a generic office setting, curt...