Janie Geiser Program 2: Time, a substance

With Janie Geiser in person

This program, titled after a phrase from Marianne Moore’s poem “Black Earth,” includes several films that were made during the intense first years of the pandemic. The films evoke a sense of suspended time and the liminal space between life and death. Memory, loss, and erasure surface and resurface in these works. 

Includes:

Ultima Thule 
2002, 10 mins, 16mm
A small, silver plane navigates an ultramarine storm, flying over barely glimpsed hills, an unlikely ferry to ”Ultima Thule”: the farthest point north, the limit of any journey. Gravity fails, land and sky lose their historical meaning. In Ultima Thule, the gridded texture of rephotographed video merges with the grain of the film, creating a kind of deep, ambiguous space, a suggestion of “the floating world.” Sound design by Leon Rothenberg.

Time, a substance series:

Reverse Shadow
2019, 8 mins, digital projection; sound collage: Janie Geiser; sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
Reverse Shadow draws on a range of sources, from target practice games for children. brochures of WWII war planes, medical books, panoramic photographs, and iphone videos shot from an airplane seat. The sound collage includes elements from the The Conet Project (recordings of Cold War–era shortwave “numbers stations”) and other found sources including an Edison audio recording of the Rip Van Winkle story. Together, these elements evoke an atmosphere of suspended apprehension, the sense that some disaster is waiting to happen. New York Premiere

Absent Objects
2020, 8 mins, digital projection; sound collage: Janie Geiser; sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
Three empty photo albums, vessels of lost time and memory beyond reach. Digital mastering by Astra Price. New York Premiere

22 Light-years
2021, 12 mins, digital projection; sound collage: Janie Geiser; sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
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 designer software. Creating digital floor plans, landscaping, and roofless homes in real time—manipulating this imagery away from the software’s intent—Geiser fabricates a digitally lush, elliptical, uncanny world, where endless planning never results in a tangible home.  Digital mastering by Astra Price. New York Premiere

Vaporetto  
2021, 3 mins, digital projection; sound collage: Janie Geiser; sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins 
A chance stereo view from a vaporetto (water bus) ride in Venice, 2019. New York Premiere

Chameleon Law 
2022, 7 mins, digital projection; sound collage: Janie Geiser; sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
A found faded set of vermillion 35mm slides—evidence of time and change. Their red hues transform the slides’ subjects—mountain landscapes of the West, long-span bridges, tourists and tourist sites—into simultaneously sublime and corrosive views. In Chameleon Law, these time-altered images, alternately depleted and extreme, suggest a heated landscape of the past and future. Digital mastering by Astra Price. New York Premiere

Heliotrope 
2023, 7 mins, digital projection; sound collage: Janie Geiser; sound mix: Kari Rae Seekins
A subterranean unraveling, seeds fall to the ground with nowhere to land. The only witness is blindfolded, and she, too, falls at some point. The underground factory operates day and night, the burrowing continues, in a long slow attempt to fabricate something that could actually make itself. Digital mastering by Astra Price. New York Premiere

Tickets: $15 / $11 senior and students / $9 youth (ages 3–17) / free for MoMI members at the Senior/Student level and above. Order tickets. Please pick up tickets at the Museum’s admissions desk upon arrival. All seating is general admission. Review safety protocols before your visit.