Janie Geiser

Los Angeles, California, USA

STATEMENT OF ARTIST PRACTICE

As a multidisciplinary artist/filmmaker, I investigate the intersection of formal artifice and real issues and emotions. A central focus of my work revolves around found and constructed images/objects in the context of a fabricated world, and the relationship of the body, especially the female body, to this world. Using a spiral structure and a hieroglyphic vocabulary, meaning is constructed through association; truth is elusive, and the questions are often between the layers.

I work both conceptually and intuitively. Something draws me in until I am compelled to explore it. There is something almost forensic about this process of unearthing possible and impossible narratives from found materials. I’m interested in using the latent power of images and objects to evoke emotional narratives that somehow speak this moment.

My work has evolved from painting and dioramas to collage film, digital media, object performance, and installation. My moving image work sometimes includes a merger of forms, and is presented in museums, storefronts, festivals, and galleries. My practice also includes experimental puppet performance with projection and live-feed video, and is presented in performance spaces as also as walk-through performances and peepshows.

ARTIST BIO

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

“Geiser gives voice to the reaches of the unconscious, pointing to the abandoned splendor that exists prior to the rules of society and language.” —Holly Willis

Geiser’s film The Red Book is a part of The National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, and her films are in the collections of MOMA, BAMPFA (Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive), the Academy Film Archive.

Geiser’s films have been presented at the National Gallery of Art, MOMA, LACMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum, Pacific Film Archive, Wexner Center, Centre Pompidou, Strausbourg Museum, Microscope Gallery, and others. Festivals include the NY Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival’s, Hong Kong International Film Festival, London International Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival, the Viennale, and others. Her single and multi-channel installations have been presented in galleries from Los Angeles to Tokyo.

A pioneer of the renaissance of American avant-garde puppet theater, Geiser creates innovative, hypnotic live performances that integrate performing objects and projection. Her performances have been presented at The Public Theater, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Redcat, The Walker Art Center, CalArts Center for New Performance, Automata, LaMama, and other venues.

A Guggenheim Fellow, Geiser’s work has been recognized with a Doris Duke Artist Award, an OBIE Award, and funding from Creative Capital, the Rockefeller Foundation, NEA, Center for Cultural Innovation, and MapFund. She is a 2018 MacDowell Fellow.

CONTACT

janiegeiser.com

DSITRIBUTOR | VIMEO | LUX | INSTAGRAM

Examples of Collage in Motion

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 objects, rephotographed video, medical illustrations, and other collage elements, Ghost Algebra suggests one of the original meanings of the word “algebra”: the science of restoring what is missing, the reunion of broken parts.

Film + Sound collage: Janie Geiser
Sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
Digital Mastering: Astra Price

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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 the artifacts of memory through subtle manipulations: reframings, layerings, inversions, and the introduction of natural elements. Gathering on a hillside, the inhabitants of ARBOR cycle through their one elusive afternoon, gradually succumbing to time or dissolving into landscape, reserving for themselves what we can’t know, becoming shadows in their own stories.

Film + Sound collage: Janie Geiser
Sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
Digital Mastering: Astra Price

22 Light-years

A time clash in suspended time, light-years away and light-years long. A house/home is imagined and re-imagined, inhabited by a family who never met. This goes on and on and on.

22 Light-years draws on a range of visual sources, including photographic negatives, diagrams, found patterned papers, and archival footage. These sources merge, sometimes uncomfortably, with video that was screen-recorded while operating desktop home design software. Material images wear the skin of the immaterial sphere, suggesting time as simultaneous, mutable, and unknown.

Film + Sound collage: Janie Geiser
Sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
Digital Mastering: Astra Price

REVERSE SHADOW

Rivers run red, planes hover above the waters, 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 woke up before the gun was fired, but a feeling of apprehension stayed with me throughout the day. Lately, even without dreaming , that apprehension is present.” —Geiser

Film+Sound collage: Janie Geiser
Sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
Digital Mastering: Astra Price

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Cathode Garden

In Cathode Garden, a girl moves between light and dark, between life and death, a distant echo of the myth of Persephone. Found negatives and photographs, botanical and anatomical illustrations, abandoned envelopes, and ancient home-made recordings re-order themselves, collapsing and emerging in this liminal world.

Film+Sound collage: Janie Geiser
Sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
Digital Mastering: Astra Price