"Double Reverse": an evening with Los Angeles-based animation artist Janie Geiser

“Janie Geiser’s acclaimed collage films delve deeply into the realm of waking dreams, weaving fragments of sounds and moving images into mysterious, elliptical narratives at the edge of logic and memory. Geiser is a master of minimal means. In her recent films, she recontextualizes outmoded images and photographs, arcane objects, and forgotten popular culture, releasing us into a sensual undercurrent of textures – the anteroom of suspended time.” –Berenice Reynaud, Redcat

Janie Geiser is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes cinema, performance, and installation. Geiser’s work is known for its recontextualization of abandoned images and objects, its embrace of artifice, and its investigation of memory, power and loss.

Geiser’s films have been presented at the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum, MOMA, LACMA, the Guggenheim, Pacific Film Archive, Wexner Center, Centre Pompidou, Strausbourg Museum, and British Film Institute, and at the NY Film Festival’s Projections, Toronto Film Festival’s Wavelengths, Hong Kong International Film Festival, London Internattional Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival, Olhar de Cinema (Brazil) and the Viennale. Her films are in MOMA’s permanent collection. Geiser’s film “The Red Book” was selected for the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

PROGRAM

“Arbor,” 16mm to digital video, color, sound, 8 minutes, 2012. Sound collage: Janie Geiser; sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins. 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.  Gathering on a hillside, lounging on the grass beyond now-lost trees, the inhabitants of “Arbor” cycle through their one elusive afternoon, gradually succumbing to time or dissolving into landscape – and becoming shadows in their own stories.

“The Hummingbird Wars,” digital video, color, sound, 11 minutes, 2014.  Sound Collage: Janie Geiser; sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins. 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. “The Hummingbird Wars” suggests theater in a time of war, which is the theater of any time.

“Cathode Garden,” digital video, color, sound, 8 minutes, 2015.  Sound collage: Janie Geiser; sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins. A young woman moves between light and dark, life and death; a latter day Persephone. The natural world responds accordingly. Neglected negatives, abandoned envelops, botanical and anatomical illustrations, and found home-made recordings re-order themselves, collapsing and re-emerging in her liminal world.

“Kriminalistik,” digital video, bw&color, sound, 5 minutes, 2013.  Sound collage: Janie Geiser; sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins. From the found book pages of an early twentieth century German book on forensics, Geiser uncovers hidden narratives.  Evidence is scientifically arranged and catalogued, suggesting a corridor to knowledge. Elusive. Crimson.

“Look and Learn,” digital video, color, sound, 11:15 minutes, 2017.  Sound collage: Janie Geiser; sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins. “Look and Learn” excavates the visual vocabulary we use to operate and construct the daily world.  “Look and Learn” explores the juxtaposition of two material image forms:  visual instructions (assembly guides, photography manuals, maps, diagrams) and photographs – mainly a set of several 1950’s era elementary school group photographs. The visual instructions mimic maps in their hope of directing us to something, or somewhere, perhaps to a better understanding of our world and how things work.

“Fluorescent Girl,” digital video, color, sound, 1.5 minutes, 2018.  Sound design: Janie Geiser. luorescent light reflects on a girl’s image, found in a book of photographs in a bookstore. She merges with other images of shadow and light, highlighting her ephemerality and ours.

Flowers of the Sky, digital video, color, sound, 9:12 minutes, 2016.  Sound collage: Janie Geiser; sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins. “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 Masonic order of the Eastern Star.  Through isolating parts of the photographs and highlighting the different groupings of the Eastern Star members, “Flowers of the Sky” reveals and obscures the original events.  The figures double, vibrate, and rise, trying to escape their emulsive lives, suggesting a rapture that extends beyond their printed world.

“Reverse Shadow,” digital video, color, sound, 8 minutes, 2019.  Sound collage: Janie Geiser; sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins. 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.  “I had a recurring dream that I was walking in the woods and a hunter mistook me for a bird. I could hear him moving through the forest. I always woke up before the gun was fired, but that feeling of apprehension would stay with me throughout the day.  Lately, even without dreaming this dream, that apprehension is present.”

“Valeria Street,” digital video, color, sound, 11 minutes, 2018.  Music composed by Laura Steenburge; sound design: Janie Geiser; sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins. “The starting point for “Valeria Street” was a box of 7 slides that had fallen from a shelf in my studio, depicting a group of men posed around a table, looking at a set of documents.  When I looked closely at the images, magnified through the camera lens, I saw that this man was my father. In recent films, I’ve been obsessed with unearthing possible and impossible narratives from photographs of strangers. I was intrigued and somewhat frightened by the idea of working with photographs of my father. The images suggest something about work and family, and how much of a life is lived outside of each other’s eyes.” –Janie Geiser